“More limbs means more human!” -Serge Yager-
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“Thanks for helping me with this one.” James leaned forward in something that might have been a bow if it weren’t just him trying to land a kiss on his boyfriend’s neck just under the skulljack port.
Anesh didn’t bother to dodge, just tilting his head so the guy he seemed to be in love with could tickle his skin. He did make an evasive maneuver when James decided to transition to lightly biting, what was now years of comfortable experience dating James and understanding how he showed affection giving Anesh an almost superhuman predictive reflex when it came to this one specific thing. Mixed with his actual slightly improved reflex time from a long ago purple orb, there was no way James was going to get to snack on his supple flesh without him at least trying to make a getaway.
He made sure not to trip over any of the material that they were moving on this teleport. They weren’t even close to the point that they were maximizing the use of space for the spherical spatial swap, but there were still a few pallets of food, building materials, and amenities like furniture that were being shipped down to Townton on this ride. And if there was one thing Anesh didn’t want to find out firsthand, it was how bad the side effects of moving through the slowly closing bubble was.
The teleporter worked by… well, he didn’t know how it worked actually. It worked by magic. But the effect it had was to start from a point either at the top or bottom of the zone, and make that point actually somewhere else. Then it spread outward at an even pace, wrapping to form a sphere that was effectively an omnidirectional portal to another part of Earth. Just Earth. The part of his brain that regretted quitting his job at NASA was mad about that.
The problem of course was that, while it had safety features like “not obliterating things due to the difference in kinetic energy between the poles and the equator”, it seemed to lack basic OSHA compliant features like any sort of effect that stopped you from touching the part that might kill you. And that was exactly what the line between here and there was, until the bubble closed and everything stabilized with two parts of the world swapped with each other; if you touched the edge as it opened, it was about as bad as putting your hand over a car window while someone tried to roll it up, but if you put your hand through the portal before it was done, it might cause it to pop like a balloon.
So Anesh decided to keep the roughhousing with his boyfriend to a minimum, and not just because he knew that he’d end up on the losing end of any play fighting. He’d been studying, going to meetings, planning lessons, and tutoring. James had been training to be a member of an elite special forces unit that, if you could find him, could single-handedly deal with a lot of very dangerous threats.
Not that this bothered Anesh. What bothered him was something else. “Ah, you bloody goober! You drooled on my neck!”
”It’s how I show affection!” James said with a perky smile as Anesh wiped the back of his sleeve on his skin. Nearby, Mark kept up his conversation with two other men who were here to do brickwork today, the burly contractor paying exactly zero attention to their antics. The woman running the teleport route on safety duty was smiling as she tried to not let them distract her. And overhead, the hue of light shifted as the bubble neared its apex, a distant sky slowly overtaking that of their home, until all of a sudden, the teleport was done. The time zone difference left them somewhere brighter and later in the day with nary a comment. “Shall we?” James asked his boyfriend.
”You’re lucky I love you, and that I have spare selves.” Anesh grumbled as he followed James, the two of them getting out of the way of the local residents and volunteers that were waiting to begin helping with unloading. On the other end, the people they’d just left behind would be going through a similar process, moving the half dozen restored cars that had just been sent back out into the parking lot, to be given mechanical checks and registered with a state somewhere.
James was of the opinion that cars sucked, and Anesh kinda agreed, even if both of them had loved the road trip they’d taken together. But until they could spawn trains ex nihilo, a lot of people still needed to get to work, and the city of Townton had a lot of abandoned vehicles that could use a new home.
“I am lucky.” James admitted in a conversational tone as he and Anesh moved into the recovering areas of the lost city. “I mean, I’m also lucky that I caught you when you weren’t completely overwhelmed. I would ask Alanna, but she’s… uh… Alannaing today. But mostly I’m just lucky you love me.” He shrugged like it was the easiest thing in the world to say. And maybe it was. Maybe he’d actually started to live the way he always talked about; a little more vulnerable and a little less afraid.
”You make it a right challenge to be mad at you for licking me.” Anesh said, adjusting his sleeves as he realized it was warmer than he’d expected.
”It’s my superpower.”
”Not the inhuman speed and accuracy?”
”It’s one of my superpowers. But I think it’s the important one!” James smiled and leaned sideways toward Anesh as they walked, but this time Anesh was even more prepared to evade. Both of them were in good spirits as they headed toward James’ latest bad idea, though for once, James actually felt lighthearted and not just like he was deflecting from a hidden tension. Maybe it was how nice this place was getting.
The streets of Townton, on average, were shattered asphalt. Ruined cars pierced by fragments of the road itself, buildings collapsed with their supports shattered, scattered broken glass everywhere, the remnant ash of a hundred small fires, and stains from everything from blood to gasoline. All of it beginning to be covered and consumed by the natural world moving back in. With nothing keeping them down, the local plant species had exploded out of cracks in the concrete, ivy and wildflowers and moss digging into every space that was no longer trampled down daily, spreading across tilted roofs and slanted facades. No corpses, though; those had all been disassembled and repurposed into more of the bone gears that animated the necroad population. Which meant that the average street in Townton also had a few of those creatures as well, rough black hovering bodies with a quartet of suspended claws that let them skate on the empty roads and tear into targets with equal ease.
Since the city had been aggressively forgotten, Order of Endless Rooms took charge of cleanup. But the division that worked here was still small even after a recent expansion, so the average street was still… that. All of that. Some parts of Townton, though, were secured, and in the process of reconstruction. Not to bring it back to how it used to be, but to use it as a starting point for something else. They’d put out the fires, recovered what personal effects of the survivors that they could, salvaged maybe a tenth of what was actually worth it, and set about building in the ruins that no one could find.
At first it was just JP and a handful of others. Then James dumped a couple traumatized ratroaches and a handful of guilty cultists on him. Then as things settled down, more volunteers and delvers moved in, and as they rescued more ratroaches, more of them opted for the place that had fewer people. But fewer didn’t mean none, and those people needed support; food, living space, maintenance, health care, more people meant more people to take care of the people. And then the population had tripled after the chanters were relocated, and even more long term volunteers from Recovery moved down.
They’d tried starting with a hotel, for living space, and had done an okay job turning it into a kind of command center for their operations. Much more comfortable than the police station they’d been using before that. But it wasn’t central to anything, and it wasn’t enough; so when there had been a slight influx of new rescues to the area, it hadn’t been too hard to pack everything up and move to a new site that encompassed a larger chunk of the old city. Still not an appreciable amount of the mostly suburban zone that used to hold over twenty thousand people, but bigger than one hotel.
They’d chosen to set up around a large park that spanned several blocks in a line. Flanked on one side by what had been an old Main Street, and by ongoing urban growth on the other, the Order had placed the designated teleport platform about a block south of their line of habitation. Many of the buildings were empty on the ground floor, but the upper levels of the businesses had been retrofitted into apartments that the human and ratroach residents lived in. An old bank acted as the new command post, with about fifteen green orb effects on it that kept it clean, a little safer, and improved communications coming from it. One of the buildings on the street had been carefully turned into a small sewer system maintenance hub for the area, after they’d cut off all the existing pipes from the rest of the city, so they had running clean water in their area courtesy of the purification brooches.
There was no broken glass here. But it didn’t look or feel like the city it had once been. Partly because when they’d been using blue orb manipulation abilities to put the buildings back together, there was a tendency to use smooth lines or small artistic flourishes that hadn’t existed before. Partly because the streets themselves were empty of cars, and instead were filled with food and medical tents, seating for people having lunch while they took a break from construction, sorting stations for salvage, and the materials for rebuilding. And partly because the park itself, a flourishing green jungle of an area, held sixty large heavy white canvas tents to house the three hundred chanters that had been brought here recently.
The chanters were technically hexapeds, though their front two limbs were more flexible than their needle like main legs, and had claws with something close enough for jazz to opposable thumbs. Wavy thick shells covered their backs, pale greys and greens mostly, with nubs and dull spikes protruding out from the sides around the ridges. Underneath, they were rather lanky creatures, mostly covered grey hide and with flat faces that had glistening vertical oval eyes taking up a huge portion of their visages.
They had two magical effects that were currently known. For one, they were empaths. Not just receivers, but very, very potent broadcasters too. They could sing or chant - hence the name - their feelings into the air as an almost atmospheric effect.
And they had arrived to the Order’s care after being kept for their whole lives in a mostly unlit basement, forced to execute human prisoners so that they’d be worth more experience points to the people that were keeping them as livestock.
So that had been a challenge.
Townton didn’t feel like it used to because even now, the chanters were still carrying the feelings of despair and bleak sorrow that had lived with them their whole existences. Some of them were just waiting to die. To be killed. Because they expected it, earnestly. And they barely even cared. The fact that they were improving, coming to trust the Order knights and restorers in some small way, didn’t change the fact that it took a strong person to live here these days.
But sometimes, they felt new things for the first time. Sometimes they felt joy, or peace, or hope, and the electric ocean of those new experiences was powerful enough to sweep out and buoy the souls of every single person in this city. Chants that would start hesitantly, confusedly, and then get picked up by a handful of the other chanters before rising and falling back down again. And it was happening more and more often, especially as they learned that there was no punishment for this behavior.
Some of the other residents, just a few, were trying to learn to chant themselves. There was a loose theory that it wasn’t innate to their species, but was something anyone could pick up. James was pretty sure it didn’t work that way, but he’d been pretty sure humans weren’t supposed to understand how dungeons made things, and that had gone out the window about the time Momo started slapping together red orb totems.
The other thing that the chanters did was make plants near them grow. In comparison, it was unimpressive and secondary, but it meant that the public park that had mostly been dead dry grass and a few exhausted sycamore trees was currently an edenic paradise that would probably collapse if all the chanters left, but sure looked like a cool part of the local area right now.
Despite the availability of the street, James and Anesh still reflexively stuck to the sidewalk as they made their way from the platform and into ‘town’. Dogwood and fiddleheads brushing against their legs as they moved past the flourishing greenery, and into the reclaimed and defended part of the city. Heading through a security checkpoint and toward where people were going about the business of their days, whether that was simple life, or more complicated attempts to experiment with new magic or communicate with their newest people.
The guard post was for the necroads that were still out there. Thousands of them, and most of them might not even be hostile. Sometimes they’d approach slowly, and a few groups had even dared to get closer and enter the revived part of town. They were watched closely when they did, but they never got close to anyone in particular, and left soon enough. Some, though, would attack on sight and weren’t shy about doing so. Which was why the guards, part of Nate’s attempt to train up people closer to actual soldiers than most of the Order, had rifles out of sight behind their little stations.
”I have clearly not been here in a while.” Anesh said, his head on a swivel as he looked around at the place. Redecorated buildings and regrown nature. The surrounding swell of noise from people who were talking, laughing, and ordering lunch from the half dozen different improvised food carts made him feel like he’d fallen back into part of London for a minute, though with fewer people and shorter lines to get a kebab. “What… happened?”
”Time, effort, magic, and life, I guess?” James shrugged. He wasn’t watching the scenery, he was watching Anesh, with a small smile on his face as he lived vicariously through his boyfriend’s fascination with the place. “Though not all our magic! There’s a surprisingly lack of orange totem buildings here, mostly because we don’t know if we’re gonna have to demolish or rebuild any of the stuff around, and Nik says that it might mess with the… well, he used a fancy new word that Research made up, but mess with the formatting basically. So those are part of phase four.”
”You have phases.” Anesh’s hand idly caught on a plant as they passed, plump fruit hanging from under wide flat leaves. “What is this?”
”Uh… huckleberry I think? Oh, fun fact I learned! There’s a different variant of them than I’m used to that’s actually native to the area! They never really got spread around though, and they’re kind of a novelty, with the exception of a few farms around here. I don’t think they’re very sweet, though. Which might be why the Oregon ones have sort of a monopoly on the market. But I might also only believe that cause I’ve lived my whole life in one place.”
”You teleport.” Anesh said, looking to James with a questioning look before he got a nod and plucked one of the berries to try. “Huh. Tha- augh.”
”Yeah the bittery soury bit really sneaks up on you, huh?”
”Why would you let me do that?!”
James spread his arms. “It’s an experience! Also the local ratroaches love these things. Share in our growing culture, Anesh!”
His boyfriend ran a thumb over his tongue, as if that would help. “You get mad when I make the curry too hot, you don’t get to lecture me on food culture. Wait, is this revenge? You bellend.”
Laughing, James pulled Anesh against him in a half hug. “Nah, I legit think these things are neat.” They kept moving, and through the thick green leaves of the hedge that acted as a porous wall between the sidewalk and the park area, James saw a pair of chanters creeping along low to the ground. Their needle legs with the joints up over their shells carrying them like they were sneaking, as they kept an eye on the humans that were on the outskirts of their new home. “But yeah, thanks again. I dunno if I said it enough.”
”This is the fourth time. Stop thanking me.” Anesh grumbled, not really that upset at all. “Despite your efforts to constantly pile more bizarre work on me, having four bodies does actually let me get an astounding amount done in a day. Like-“
”Alanna.”
”…You are impossible.” Anesh’s skin darkened to a rich copper as he looked away from James and cleared his throat. “I was going to say like-“
“Kee-“
Anesh clapped a hand over James’ mouth, getting a few curious looks from the people eating lunch at the tables under a tent in the street that they were passing by. “Hush you git. Go back to thanking me for being helpful. But if you’re really not interested, I can-“
”Mmmph hm hmmphm!” James said, pulling Anesh’s arm down so he could talk normally. “No, wait, I’m sorry! Took the joke too far, I actually do care what you’ve been up to! Actually, though, before that, you said ‘four bodies’ and not ‘four selves’. Are you… I dunno, doing the hive mind thing a little deeper? It’s been a while since we’ve plugged our brains together, I don’t know how you feel about it.”
Sometimes, Anesh thought to himself, talking to his boyfriend involved a lot of emotional whiplash. The way James could go from goofing off to serious and considered questions about small details in conversations sometimes felt like a football match where, sometimes, the ball would try to eat the next foot that contacted it. “You are impossible.” Anesh said with a sigh as they rounded a corner and slipped around a park bench, James pointing out the spot they were headed toward. “Well. Here’s the thing.” He sighed as he put his thoughts in order. “I’m trying to decide if I want to be one person, or four people, I think. Having four copies of myself that we all refresh into the same person over and over is… it’s just not good. I feel like I’m missing three fourths of my life. All I have are memories of things, but I never experienced them. There’s a bizarre difference.”
”Hm.” James let his hand linger on Anesh’s arm. “Have you maybe considered learning guided meditation, or maybe talking to Lua or another of our therapists about cognitive behavior therapy? It might help when you’re syncing with yourself, to make the memories less… foggy, maybe?”
”Can’t hurt!” Anesh nodded appreciatively. “I’ll check into it when we’re home. But yeah, Marlea’s writings are… uh…”
”Terrifying and awesome?”
”Interesting.”
”A look into the potential mass upheaval of all of humanity but also super cool and deeply rooted in compassion and positive self-esteem?”
”No, I meant interesting.” Anesh snorted. “I mean, she’s… okay, you’re reading farther into them than she’s writing, I think. Marlea is really just actually talking about the pros and cons of essentially… well it’s not suicide, but it is an abandonment of the singular sense of self.”
”I wouldn’t even call it abandonment.” James offered. “More like… hm. Temporary divestment? Like, her call to action is to say that you don’t need your ego all the time, and I have a hard time arguing with that.”
Anesh nodded. “I agree, your ego could take a break sometimes.”
”Hey!”
”But in my case, it would more be a logistical problem. Since all of me are me, the biggest issue is just keeping a connection up. And unlike Marlea, I don’t keep myselfs all in one place. Right now - oh, you asked what I’ve been doing, here - right now I’m assembling materials for a lesson plan, working on the algorithm to help nail down purple orb effects from data points, and making soup. And I’m here with you. All those Anesh are in different places.”
”Ah. So you’d need to be using the actual human internet if you wanted to keep linked up.” James nodded, looping his arm through Anesh’s for a few steps before they both realized they weren’t even close to capable of the romantic gesture of walking that closely without constantly kicking each other. “So the other direction is…?”
”Cutting myself loose.” Anesh shrugged. “Being four people named Anesh, who are really comfortable with each other, because we share twenty nine years of life.”
”I always forget you’re younger than me.”
Anesh poked James in the ribs. ”Yeah, cradle robber. Ah, we can talk more about this later. I assume we’re here.”
They were here. Here in this case was the pavilion where the Order made most of their efforts, with marginal success, to communicate with the chanters. A wide tent of heavy tan canvas, weatherproof for when needed but currently open to the afternoon sunshine, the inside was an eclectic mix of tables and chairs, with whiteboards and computers for keeping records, mixed with comfortable nests of blankets and pillows, a few attempts at custom crafted seating for chanters specifically, and a singular out of place couch that was magic.
Specifically, the couch made it so that the place it was in gave a constant conceptual boost to understanding. Stronger for whoever was on the couch, as in, whoever was sitting on it could be understood pretty easily, even if, as a completely random example, they had their jaw wired shut from that time they fell thirty feet and headbutted a wall on the way down. But the effect extended to the ‘room’ the couch was in, especially if the room needed a couch. It was a bizarre category of magic item, and James loved it. He just wished it hadn’t come from the worst fucking dungeon he knew of.
There were ten other people in the tent, which made it a little crowded without being cramped. One of them was Indira, the round faced Indian woman almost glowing with excitement as she had taken to her leadership role in the communication efforts like a fish to water. The fact that she liked to hang around in a really well made mermaid tail both as a way to make the chanters more comfortable with someone who looked less human, and to hide her own missing leg, made the fish to water part a little closer to literal.
There were also a few other residents and helpers. One of whom was Kirk, a man who still felt guilty about the whole ‘destroying the city’ thing that his cult had perpetrated. But these days, James would be hard pressed to find someone more loyal to the Order, and to trying to put things right, so despite his own internal discomfort there was no one here who felt afraid of him. James was actually surprised he was here, and not out on the active Horizon delve going on right now, but he was a welcome addition. There were also a couple very young ratroaches who were here more on the side of learning communication skills than teaching them.
The fact that the Akashic Sewer didn’t make all its ratroaches out of magic and dreams had been an interesting thing to learn. Academically, it meant that ratroaches could reproduce, and were a species and not an anomaly like most dungeon life. Even camracondas, who had primary sexual traits, seemed to have them as an affectation and not to have kids. Other Office life, like iLipedes, just… didn’t have life cycles as part of an ecosystem. The dungeon made them, eventually they’d age to death, and that was it. But ratroaches could have kids.
It violently killed the mother, of course, because the Akashic Sewer was rather dedicated to the practice of causing maximum pain to everyone it could. Which went a long way toward explaining why half the female ratroaches that went through a shaper substance recreation of their bodies opted to either change themselves to male forms, or just removed their whole reproductive system.
The ratroaches here were just shy of six months old, but they were already four feet tall and emotionally closer to a human ten year old. Faceted eyes and spined antenna flicked to an fro as they watched the people in the tent, curiosity and apprehension definitely there, but they’d been pulled out of the Sewer very young, and lacked a lot of the overwhelming fear responses that older ratroaches had.
It was just weird to see ratroach kids. At least, to James. He was so used to them being… not adults, exactly, but something that wasn’t literal actual children. But he’d take confusion any day if it meant they’d get to grow up and have a real actual childhood.
The other five people in the tent were chanters. They were nervously standing around in a rough ring, and it was not hard to tell they were nervous, because as he approached, James began to feel it too.
Chanter emotional broadcasts were weird, because they didn’t exactly make you feel the exact emotions. Instead, it was more like having a big neon sign declaring the emotion, in a way that was very, very hard to not pay attention to. Red orbs, the ones from the Office that gave emotional resonance ranks, were incredibly valuable here in Townton. The ability to rapidly sort out which emotions were yours and which were in the air was hugely helpful. As was the ability to understand and react to the chanter broadcasts without being too influenced by them; reacting to fear with compassion, instead of more fear, was critical.
Despite being nervous, though, the chanters were still here. They were, in James’ opinion, the bravest fucking people on the planet right now. Either that, or they still weren’t totally sure that the Order wasn’t just demanding a tribute in lives, and they expected to be sacrificed so someone could level up. But James hoped they were at least past that by now.
”Paladin, welcome!” Indira’s greeting was pleasant and respectful, a robustly crafted personality that wasn’t quite as natural as Sarah’s was, but was no less impressive in how easily she put people at ease.
”Hey mate.” Kirk said with a single nod. “Mates.” He conceded quickly, tilting his head at Anesh. “Welcome to town.”
”I thought it was Townton.” Sometimes, James opened his mouth, and words fell out, before he really had time to filter whatever dumb thing he was about to say. “No, sorry, back up. Terrible non-joke. Ignore me.” With a small huff of laughter, Kirk gave him a quick thumbs up, which showed off a thickly wrapped and lightly red-stained bandage under his jacket sleeve. “Oh dang, you okay?”
”Huh? Oh.” Kirk rubbed his arm loosely. “Uh… don’t worry about it.”
If any comment was going to make James and Anesh ‘worry about it’, it was that one. But the duo just gave Kirk matching glowers that they’d honed together on Alanna whenever she suggested they go to the gym together, before letting it drop.
”Stop harassing my underlings.” Indira directed James, pointing her hand like a lance in his direction from her wheelchair. “And stop making our friends nervous!” The friends in question were definitely the chanters; the ratroach kids seemed like they were hiding secret giggles at watching Kirk get in trouble with the other adults.
Still, James didn’t want to make anyone feel nervous, so he let his face drop back to a resting expression, and turned to the spike shelled creatures that shifted back as he looked at them. Only a little, but enough that he noticed.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Moving carefully, James passed around them, and slowly lowered himself to one of the piles of pillows on the ground. The tent had a few basic carpets laid out so they weren’t just on the street, but it still felt weird to him to feel like there was something cozy like this in the middle of a road. His careful motion fell apart at the end as he overcommitted and dropped the last half foot with a thump, but after that, he pulled himself to a cross legged position and met the palm sized oval eyes of the nearest chanter that was watching him. “Hey there.” James said. “How’s it going? Enjoying the sun?” He paused, and bit the inside of his cheek before looking over at the humans and single camraconda in the tent. “Hey, actually, are they okay with the sun?”
”Yes.” Indira confirmed quickly. “Actually this is pretty close to what would be their ‘native’ environment. Especially when it’s humid.” She gave a dramatic pause, hazel eyes looking up at the ceiling of tent. “It is very humid here, especially for something this far from the equator.”
”Cool.” James turned back to the chanters. “Anyway. Hi. I know you can’t quite ‘hear’ me, but I’m glad you guys are here today.”
The chanters actually did settle down. The effect of the ‘room’, the little boost to understanding each other, let them… not exactly know what he was saying. But they could feel the calm optimism in his words, in their own form of language. Just like he could sort of get it when they toned down the nervous energy they were putting off.
The biggest problem with the chanters was one that they seemed to share with James’ first dungeon friend, Rufus. An inability to click with spoken language. They could vocalize, certainly, and it might actually not be a magically imposed problem at all. But the process of communicating complex thoughts with them kept hitting roadblocks.
One of the biggest, and also the grimmest, theories was that they were essentially deprived of mental stimulation for so long that they were akin to humans that were deprived of education or freedom as kids. They might actually not have the framework to learn, even with the skill orbs for languages. Another theory said that they just needed to find a starting point, but until then, there was a barrier in how the different species approached communication that made it difficult to get anything across.
Either way, none of that would stop the Order of Endless Rooms from providing care for them, for as long as they needed it. Personally, James was really interested in how the next generation of chanters would grow up, because it would rapidly validate at least one theory. And going by the vile records they’d ‘confiscated’ from the group that had kept the chanters prisoner, the eggs that the chanters were keeping safe would probably be hatching in the next month or so.
Which made it important to James, and to a lot of other people, that they find a solution now, if possible. Which was why he was here.
Anesh dropped onto the pillows next to him, and James kept facing the chanters as one of them tentatively approached. The pointed tips of their legs making muffled taps on the carpet as the individual closed the few feet between them. The chanter smelled like burned cinnamon, the scent getting stronger to James as it got closer, at close range overwhelming the omnipresent flavor of summer pollen in the air.
”It’s impressive how comfortable with you they are.” Indira said softly.
”Well.” James spoke to her without taking his eyes off the chanter or the little smile off his face. “We’ve met before. Haven’t we?”
There was only one individual chanter that James had ‘met’, exactly. And it was the one that he’d briefly plugged his brain into. Which, he was pretty sure, was this exact one. It had only been a short moment, but it was an important one, and details like the two uneven conical spikes on the left side of the shell, or the lighter shade of grey hide, stood out to James as details of a person and not a category, which let him recognize who he was talking to and not just what.
Kirk saw that they were getting comfortable, and gave a quick wave to the tent. “Hey, you kids have fun. I’m gonna take these kids and give you some space. We’ll be back later tonight, Dee.”
”Stop hunting for nicknames for me.” Indira said with a dramatic roll of her eyes. “Imu, Iru, Sunshine, you three be good for Kirk, okay?”
”Y-y-y-yes okay.” The two ratroaches stammered out, undeterred by their uncooperative tongues. The camraconda, who James hadn’t realized was young, just nodded and hissed, before the three of them all followed the older human out and giving the tent more of an open air.
”So.” Anesh said to James as the others left and the chanters seemed to relax slightly more. “Before we do this, I have to ask…”
”I think it’s important.” James replied as his boyfriend opened the pack he had and started to pull out a router and ethernet cables. “I think we should be doing everything we can, and this is a preexisting way of doing things that we know works. And I also know it helps if I have an extra mind, but Zhu was busy today.”
”I find it weird that the person who lives in your head can be busy without you.” Indira cut in, getting a series of taps from the chanter’s legs as they rotated to look at her, until she wheeled herself over to be sort of ‘between’ the two sides of the conversation. “You’re also not the only one to try connecting with them, just so you know. You’re just the only one who’s had any success.”
”Zhu is a free spirit. Almost literally!” James grinned, though the toothy expression slid into a sad frown as it caused clear distress in the chanter that was nearest him. “Sorry, sorry. I’m not gonna eat you. It’s okay to come sit next to me if you want?” The chanter seemed to freeze as if considering the words, before raising itself up an inch and creeping forward, legs slipping off of pillows before lowering the whole body back down onto a cushion closer to them. Closer, though still out of easy reach. A calculated display of trust. “I’ll take it.” James breathed the words out.
Anesh tried to clip cables into ports on the router with the quietest clicks possible, but it didn’t quite work out, and he ended up making loud noises that startled everyone in the tent, human and chanter alike. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Also James, that wasn’t what I was going to ask you.”
”Oh?”
”I need to know if you’re diabetic. Chevoy said it was important, and that last time you gave the wrong answer.”
”…Circumstances have changed.” James decided to use the most neutral voice possible.
Which Indira took exactly the wrong way. “You can cure diabetes?” She asked.
”It would be we, not you, since you’re part of us. But also no, I just had a magical assault disease inflicted on me. Sorry.” James sighed. “It’s a long and wretched story and I don’t… I don’t want to…”
The look that Anesh gave him made it clear that his boyfriend instantly regretted the comment. But Anesh just wasn’t sure if now was the time to try to comfort his partner over the events surrounding the Underburbs. He still reached out to set a hand on James’ shoulder, and offered a small physical comfort as his partner took a steadying breath.
It bothered him that the part of his brain that was magically trained with a variety of perception tricks noticed the chanter’s reaction. They definitely took notice of the action, specifically. The specific combination of the change in James’ tone, the instant reaction from Anesh, and their combined body language, it meant something to them. And it didn’t take Anesh more than a second to find that his brain had already provided an answer.
”Do they recognize us reacting to emotional cues?” He asked Indira. Which, weirdly, was the best thing he could do to help James too. His boyfriend seemed to operate best when there was a puzzle to solve or a conversation to participate in, as a way of paving over his own anxieties. Probably not healthy, but Anesh wasn’t a therapist. Yet. He tested a lot of yellow orbs, so it might just be a matter of time.
Indira nodded, adjusting her position in her chair to lean an elbow on one of the arms. “They do. It surprised them a little, at first, so I don’t think they ever saw anything like it from the monsters.” She twisted her artificial mermaid tail slightly as she leaned forward and watched the chanters with clear admiration. “They do learn, though, when they see us doing things. They might not know spoken language, but they recognize that we’re communicating like them in some ways.”
”That’s good to know.” James said, idly running his hand over his chin. “That might be a good starting point for this test. Anyway, no, Anesh, I’m not diabetic. Thanks.” He didn’t add that the real reason Zhu wasn’t here was that the navigator sort of was, and that they hadn’t managed to find anything to clear the magically inflicted medical issue from him. “Anyway!” He kept his exclamation quiet, so as not to startle anyone. “Should we get started?”
He was mostly addressing the chanter nearest to him, but Anesh took it as a direction too. Indira watched as they disconnected their personal skulljack braids, and plugged directly into a local network in a setup that made it much, much easier to fall into someone else’s mind. Almost too easy, sometimes. The router was modified, because the Order’s engineering department had a compulsion, but it still opened them up to a sort of vulnerability that required a lot of trust to do. Indira also made them wait for everyone else, including one of the local first aid people, to show up. Just in case, she reminded them.
James felt pretty good though, as he slowly offered the third end of the skulljack connection to the chanter he’d first connected to when they’d rescued their people. He’d spent a lot of his time lately being reactive to problems. Defensive actions and last minute lunges for solutions. It felt really good to have the time and space to be able to pick an ongoing issue off a list and just decide he was going to tackle that today. Maybe not an end-all solution, but at least get some work in.
He wasn’t sure how the chanter felt about it. But they still took the familiar length of cord in one of their foreclaws when James handed it to them, and mimicked his motion to connect it to the port that had been forged on their neck underneath the thick shell. It took a few tries; connecting cables to things was sort of a foreign concept to the creatures that had lived their whole lives in dark isolation.
But they did get it, after a few tries. And very quickly, James and Anesh could feel the potential connection they had access to. They were both experienced at this by now, at sort of having a way of probing with their minds across the unnatural bridge that humans weren’t really evolved to have a sense for.
It was like being in a dark room, where you couldn’t feel the floor. But you could feel yourself, and every time you took a step, you mapped out a bit of the area. If you reached out and grabbed a doorknob, you wouldn’t actually know, but when you opened a door, you could feel every motion of the hinges, and hear the echo of the space beyond. And none of the doors were locked. Passwords slowed you down, made everything complicated, and there was no getting past them online. But if you were directly plugged into something, a skulljack let you just kind of sidestep a lot of digital security, in a way that would probably have far reaching repercussions later when the technology spread outside the Order.
James closed his eyes, and let himself be at peace in that little dark room. Felt the presence of Anesh there with him. He knew the digital architecture of his own self so closely now that it was easy to sense when someone stumbled through the door and said hi.
Minds had a tendency to instantly abandon individuality across direct skulljack connections. And James quickly started to fall into a shared hive mind with the chanter. But Anesh was there and wired to act as support; holding a part of his individuality and persona back, to observe and guide the process. It was a bit surreal, and a bit hard to explain; like he was piloting his own thoughts rather than thinking them. But it didn’t take long before James started to feel like the alien experience was worth it.
The chanter was confused and scared and expectant of something unpleasant and hungry. And now, James was too. They both were, though ‘both’ wasn’t a word that mattered anymore. They were one and the same, with only a part of James held back to observe with Anesh.
The first time they’d done this, the feeling of despair had been… not overwhelming. Because that implied that it was something that drowned out normal life, and it didn’t do that. It had been everything, at all times. There was nothing but the despair. An existence defined by a hollow lack of hope, lack of light, lack of anything. Mechanical adherence to motion forced by threat of violence, and nothing else.
This time, it was still there. It wasn’t gone. You couldn’t get rid of that kind of pain overnight, or over the course of months. Maybe you couldn’t get rid of it ever. But it wasn’t everything. It formed a core, that all other emotions checked in with on a regular basis. Satisfaction, calm, joy, satiation, safety, anything that wasn’t the despair would rotate around it and sometimes tether itself to the central memory. “Is this,” the chanter part of them asked at all times, “going to be like this?”
They didn’t use words to ask it. They used feelings. But it was a familiar dance, that James understood, because the half of them that was him had something quite similar. His trauma wasn’t nearly as vast and bottomless, but the pattern was the same. Emotions that reflected and refracted through other emotions. Context and history that redefined new feelings. The mutual entity found that it was easy to compare the two different ways of things, as they were really quite similar. And yet, the James side, despite having a lot of extra things attached to the orbited emotions, was far simpler in execution than the chanter side.
”Fascinating.” Anesh’s voice said out loud as he and the fragment of James observed the joined minds thinking about themselves. “They do have a language. It’s just not like ours.”
Indira’s sharply defined eyebrows shot up as she watched quietly, the woman keeping quiet until the end in case she interrupted something. The other four chanters shifted, though no longer nervously. Instead, they clicked and made low cries and output a feeling of curious intrigue that the humans and camraconda in the tent were more than willing to be swept up in.
James and the chanter didn’t process most of it. His shared self was too busy thinking about everything. As the minutes passed, and each physical mind passed concepts back and forth, it became easier and easier for the collective whole to get what the problem had been. Both problems, really; they were distinct from each other.
The first problem was that the chanters were still waiting to die. And the dread and grim acceptance was used by the shared self to cover up and try to obfuscate cunning and conspiracy. But the James side was a master of self-deception, and the chanter was an ameture at best. The single person couldn’t lie about this to itself; there were plans among the chanters for a number of situations. Where the weak points in the perimeter were, where the necroads were more passive, where the most armed humans weren’t. How to organize a column, how to protect the eggs, how to perform a clumsily executed breakout maneuver.
Not for if they were rounded up and executed, but when.
So James nudged Anesh, and let himself open up more. Let the chanter in to the deeper parts of his soul, let them blend together, and focused as best he could on actively thinking thoughts so that they would stick on the other side when the link was cut. But he did it in a style that addressed the second problem.
The second problem was that the chanters spoke in emotions. The second-and-a-half problem was that they sucked at it. Status Quo had committed genocide in two ways, and the forced elimination of a people’s language was the accidential byproduct of their disgusting treatment of the chanters. With nothing to feel but despair and resignation, and active punishment for communicating in their own way, the chanters never developed a vocabulary. Their older generations that had a language were long dead. The new ones were slave children, separated by force from their own history and culture, with an insurmountable gap between now and then.
So the chanter didn’t have the words, and James didn’t have the ‘words’. The chanters though, as Indira had pointed out, weren’t idiots. They had intelligence and they noticed things. They learned. So they were patching together more and more of their own brand new emotions into something that wasn’t really a language, but was useful for transmitting meaning in small ways.
And the shared creature tapped into that. With James opening himself up, with complete honesty, and getting outside aid from Anesh to repeat thoughts across both of them. Over and over again, until it was sure to stick in some way. That the Order was never going to hurt them, at first, but that was too abstract. So instead, they narrowed the scope to something more personal. Revulsion, orbiting a feeling of violence. Sorrow, orbiting the experience of seeing others in pain.
If it was two people trying to share with each other, it would be impossible. Despite James, in retrospect having the words to describe it, in the moment it felt complexly alien and confusing. But only to him, and not to them. As it wasn’t each side individually trying to understand, but instead, one shared creature that was thinking with both types of mind, it was more like meditation. Rolling over ideas and vibes and really just spending time considering things within the joint perspective.
Which, surprisingly, was compelling to the combined entity. Maybe it was just how novel the experience was, but both James and the chanter didn’t feel any urgency or need to flee the situation. Instead, slowly, the shared emotion of trepidation was replaced by honest curiosity and creativity as they dredged up parts of each side of themselves, presented it, and looked at it from the twin perspective.
Over and over. Two lives, one of them certainly worse than the other, but slowly giving context and details to each other. It was easy to understand now, but the dual person quickly realized that the point wasn’t to understand now, it was to lay a framework to each understand when they were separated again.
They lost track of time. Kept their two sets of eyes closed, and just let the world become thoughts. It wasn’t like there was some kind of sensory deprivation going on; the observers both human and chanter were still making noises and talking and emoting, the passage of the minutes and then hours meant they were getting hungry in two uniquely uncomfortable ways, the whole ‘sitting on the ground’ thing was fine for the chanter half but deeply uncomfortable for the human body’s back. So they didn’t exactly detach from the world, and they couldn’t do this forever.
Eventually, they had to stop though. Anesh prompted it, his own guiding thoughts on James’ mind informing his boyfriend that he couldn’t keep doing this for long. The information filtering to the duel existence of James and the chanter was actually fascinating because it revealed the concept of a romantic love to the side that had never felt anything of the sort. And it was tempting, very tempting, to just push Anesh back and restart the looping meditation discussion, to explain things like boyfriends from the shared perspective.
But Anesh insisted, and the other party resignedly agreed that they should probably go get lunch or something as a pair of stomachs made their discomfort known. It really was inconvenient having a fallible body, sometimes.
Disconnecting was a bit abrupt, because there was no getting around that when you weren’t using most of the special hard and software filters that had been built for it. But afterward, James opened his eyes to feel like he understood the chanters just a little bit clearer than before. Like their emoting was something more than a reflex, even if it was still in the nascent stages of a language.
Next to him, the chanter he’d been linked to wobbled to rise on bladed needlepoint legs, and twisted their head sideways to look at James and Anesh with a newly built understanding. And then, surprising even James, they opened their mouth and uttered something.
”Awaaak.” The chanter said, before their glistening oval eyes dilated slightly and their body language deflated.
James smiled at the attempt, hiding his own amusement. Social comfort, obfuscation of vulnerability. He tried to reply. And then realized he had said exactly nothing except made some weird motions with his shoulders. “Oh. That’s… wow, that’s really hard to do as a human, huh?” He asked.
”What, interpretive dance?” Indiria asked.
”No, I… you know what, I’ll tell you later.” He said, stretching out in full, and finding it pleasantly satisfying that the chanter he’d been connected to didn’t flinch or express any nervousness at all. The other four did, kind of, but so did the Order members in the tent as the connected chanter hopped and flexed their legs out. Or maybe that was just James reading into body language too much, overly sensitive to a form of communication that humans and camracondas only partly participated in. “The good news is, they’re not actually that alien. And the better news is, I think we can both learn how to talk like each other.”
”Baawkp.” The chanter agreed, before ducking their head in either embarrassment or frustration.
”Exactly, thank you.” James replied with a smile, reflexively trying to push emotion out through a mechanism he didn’t have in this body. “Whoof. Okay, two things…” he trailed off.
Anesh picked up for him, having been ‘watching’ the whole time. “Three things. One, that form of connection is an excellent way to overcome seemingly imposed inabilities in communication, and we should try it with Rufus and the other striders if they’re interested. Two, even I’m feeling the residual effects, and I wasn’t really part of you for most of it. So we need to be careful.”
”Maybe grow some specific programs for it.” James mused. “Wait, you said three?”
”Three, I have been very patient, and I’m not upset, but I need to find a washroom rather quickly please.” Anesh said as he stood and looked at the locals with pleading eyes.
Indira gave a small titter of laughter as she pointed with a tilt of her hand. “Out of the pavilion, take a left, there’s a building with blue and white signs on it. Bill did whole thing up as a… well, you don’t need the history.” She set her mouth in a line as Anesh was already halfway out the tent.
”Okay thank you!” He called back, rapidly vanishing from view with a wave.
”So.” James said, rising and resisting the urge to clap his hands eagerly while he waited for Anesh to get back. The chanters, especially the one he’d been linked to, looked like they were sort of echoing a similar emotion. “This went well! Do you-“ He stopped as all five chanters made quick swishing motions with their forelimbs to the others in the tent, and then rapidly scuttled out to the street, moving as a group as they headed off without any further fanfare. “…huh.” James watched them go, feeling weirdly glad that they were comfortable enough to just leave like that.
With the chanters gone and the show over, the support people filtered out pretty quickly, though Indira made plans with one of them to get dinner later. James didn’t actually recognize them by name, but he gave friendly nods to the different people he’d seen around who had been on hand in case things went wrong.
And with that, the wide pavilion was a lot emptier and less crowded, just a waiting and well organized space with some comfortable seating and a few other things. “Well, anyway.” James continued his earlier thought. “Do you think anyone else would be up for trying this?” He asked Indira. “I can keep coming back, but I’ve got a lot of plans for the next month or so.”
The woman shifted her head back and forth, one hand itching softly at where her silicone tail was wrapped around her body. “Difficult to say.” She said, her accent stretching the first word into its component syllables. “Certainly, someone on our side will want to try. Whether they reciprocate is hard to predict. The real question is, how important is the adjunct?” She looked after where Anesh had run off.
”Pretty important.” James answered. “If I didn’t have him holding part of me back, I don’t think I could have done the… well, it’s hard to explain. I’m going to have to take some time after I process it all to write it up, if that’s okay.”
”Take your time. We’re not rushing.”
James smiled as he looked out of the tent’s front flap and into the park across the way. ”Especially now.” He said. “I hope that my conversation partner can spread it around, but I think… I think that I got them at least to understand that we want them to be safe. Or at least, that I do. I don’t know, it’s weird! They’re ‘supposed’ to have emoting as their primary communication tool, but I think that the chanters are maybe biologically inclined toward individualism.”
Indira wheeled her chair back to the table she used, taking the router and cords James handed off and finding a box for them. “How do you mean?”
”There’s a joke about a religious sect that goes ‘if you’ve met one Jesuit, then you’ve met one Jesuit.’” He grinned, though she didn’t return it, just tilted her head and stared at him looking for an explanation. “The idea being, because of how they’re trained, you cannot make assumptions about members within a group based on other members of the group. Every case is individual and must be studied and have conclusions drawn independently. I think the chanters do that.”
”Ah. Ah.” Indira looked engaged now. “You’re saying that when we try to tell them ‘we’ won’t hurt them, it doesn’t register. Or, maybe if they believe us, they think ‘we’ is the people in the room. They need to make up their minds about each person on their own.” She thought about it, then frowned. “I am not sure it tracks, however. After all, they believe about us what they believed about the monsters, don’t they? They are capable of generalizing.”
”They are.” James nodded. “Though that’s different in a way. That’s sorting the world into two categories; them and everyone else. What we’re asking them to do is harder, because it means building mental models for a lot of different groups. Status Quo is easy, they’re the them they always assumed, with a different name. But now there’s the Order, and within that, there’s your outreach branch, the medical personnel, the people with the food, the ratroaches who live here…”
”The ‘ratroaches who live here’ are often part of those other groups.” Indira pointed out.
”I know that. But do they know that? And even worse, the ratroaches often have different behaviors because of their own traumatic pasts. Which changes how you think about them. They’re part of multiple ‘groups’ in that way. To us, it’s easy; we’re used to thinking that way. To the chanters… I don’t even know if it’s innate to them, it could just be that they’ve never been anything but captives.” James sighed deeply. “Morose, I know.”
”Yes, you’re bringing down the mood.” Indira seemed like she wasn’t joking when she said that, which struck James as a little uncomfortable. “Enjoy the success. You talked. So to answer your question, yes. Yes, we will find people who want to try. I’m certain that there are pairs with the proper adaptations who can do what you did. Even if there aren’t many, this is an opportunity. A way forward.”
And underneath her words, James heard something else. A little side effect of the boosted understanding; the implication that she felt like she was maybe a little too useless here. The desperate need to prove herself, to make sure the Order didn’t abandon her because she wasn’t pulling her weight. It was bitter, and angry, and she didn’t say it out loud, but it was still there in her words.
James shot a glare at the Underburbs couch. That kind of thing might technically be improved understanding, but it felt like a violation in a small way. And Indira noticed him noticing.
”Sorry.” He said quickly, for nothing at all. “Uh, scowling at furniture is a religious observance for me.”
”Really.” She said with an intentionally schooled emotional tone.
”Nah, but don’t worry about it.” James sighed. “Well, fuck it, I’m gonna steal a page from Alanna’s playbook and just plow through this problem. It’s cool what you’re doing here. And even if this doesn’t work, it’s good that you’re helping to acclimate these people to their freedom and to our presence. But even if you weren’t, you’re welcome in the Order, you know? Your membership isn’t contingent on your day job.”
”…I would rather not talk about this.” Indira bluntly stated, pivoting to avoid looking at him.
James shrugged it off. “That’s cool.” He said, then got quickly distracted by his boyfriend’s return. “Ah, Anesh! Just in time for me to ask you on a lunch date!”
”It’s… not a date if we’re here for work.” Anesh said.
James linked arms with Anesh, pressing against his partner. ”Nonsense. Any lunch can be a date. Hey Indira, there’s a bunch of food things around here now, where are random interlopers like us allowed to eat?”
”At literally any of them.” The woman rolled her eyes at James’ attempted levity. “Though perhaps skip on the Mexican offering if Roland is helping today.”
”…well now I gotta know.” James said, sharing a flummoxed expression with Anesh.
Indira sighed dramatically. “The man is still obsessed with the products of the Route Horizon. So while I’m sure he’s a perfectly reformed person, he insists on trying to use the new plants in food, and Dorothy dotes on him enough that she allows it.”
James had a distant memory of Alanna telling him something about the mass of stolen seeds from the Horizon’s deadly and protected train being things that grew beans. But that was only a month ago, at most. “You don’t mean the bean thing, do you?” He asked. “That shouldn’t…”
”Shouldn’t be possible, shouldn’t be grown yet, yes, yes, tell me more about what magic can and cannot do.” Indira scoffed.
”Sorry, what do the beans do?” Anesh asked, trying to be polite despite his growing sense that maybe he didn’t actually like this person.
Indira looked surprised. “Oh! I assumed you knew. They’re a hyperadaptive species of bean somewhere between black and pinto beans in terms of texture and flavor. They grow… rapidly, if the seeds are left anywhere outside of their original dungeon containers.”
”How hyperadaptive?” James asked with interest. “Like, can you plant them in sand?”
”They would plant themselves in sand.” Indira scrunched up her nose in aggravation. “The first ‘crop’ of them is how we learned exactly how flexible they were, as a few that spilled from the dungeon sacks took root in the shipping container they were being stored in. More still grew through the concrete in my apartment when they were dropped during a move.”
”Ah.” James understood why she might be irate about the beans now, and his mild discomfort got pushed aside in favor of sympathy. He wouldn’t want his apartment damaged by beans, certainly. “So they grew shipping container beans? Or concrete beans?”
”No, the same beans. They just grow anywhere.”
”…Anesh I want to eat dungeon beans.” James demanded, giving his boyfriend puppy dog eyes. “That sounds so cool. I want to taste a thing that isn’t like an Earth plant! Can we go get a burrito made out of magic? Please?”
”I’m already on board you don’t need to… actually, no, keep begging. It’s a cute look on you.” Anesh turned the script on his partner as he laughed.
Indira tried to shoot down James’ fun. “They do just taste like they’re between two normal beans.”
”Indira, I need you to understand, he stopped listening to reason when you said ‘dungeon beans’.” Anesh tried to tell her, shaking his head.
They said their goodbyes and thank yous before leaving, but James’ mind was already elsewhere. On how something as simple as a bean might be yet another lever by which he could move the world. And on what, exactly, a burrito would taste like when it was made from food that wasn’t from normalcy.
It turned out, it was fine. He wasn’t really impressed by it or anything.
But it was different, and new, and that made it feel like a small adventure in itself. James and Anesh spent the rest of their afternoon in Townton, having a slow lunch, talking about the chanters, and watching the convoy from the last Route Horizon delve roll back into the zone.
Under the summer sun, in the humid air, it felt like the whole world was opening up ahead of them.