"There is very little practical use for happiness however, and it's mostly a waste product. We need some, but to ensure that my factory doesn't come to a halt due to excessive joy, I need to bottle it first and then release it as steam." -DoshDoshington, How Hard is it to Beat ULTRACUBE?-
_____
Nik and Reed were crouched next to one of the fixed tables in the potion testing lab. Installed early because not bumping valuable experiments onto the floor was a critical part of the scientific process, the heavy table was partly sunk into the floor, and had an enclosed cabinet underneath instead of open space. Currently, the entire sterile surface of it was taken up by a single enclosure that housed eighteen white lab rats.
”Well, they’re not smart.” Nik ventured.
”They aren’t not smart…” Reed countered, fighting back the urge to grab a handful of his curly hair and start yanking on it.
Nik leaned in closer, watching a couple of the rats apparently playing with a small ball that was in their personal space. “No, they’re not smart. But. They’re having a good time?”
”Oh, sure, yeah. By every metric humanity knows to measure ratroach happiness, they’re-“
”Rat.” Nik cut him off. “Rat happiness.”
”What did I say?”
”Ratroach?”
”…We don’t have ways to measure ratroach happiness, do we?” Reed kept watching a small cluster of their test subjects as they shared food, one of them presenting the meal to the others and all of them beginning to gnaw on the small collection of kibble together. “Sorry, I’ve been working on the ratroach genome thing, and also hanging out with… anyway I’ve got them on the brain.”
Nik shrugged. Honestly that was a much more boring reason than he’d been hoping for. ”Happens. But you’re right, they’re happy rats.”
”Yeah…” The two of them went quiet, staring at the small rat utopia sitting down here in the Lair’s basement. “This is weird, right?” Reed finally said.
”I mean…” Nik waved an arm around them. “We’re sitting in an alchemy lab, where what we were supposed to be doing today was trying to isolate whether base elements work for potions. Weird is subjective.”
Reed nodded without feeling it. ”Oh, yeah, I get you. But this is weird, right?”
”We have a blender that filters pure potassium out of bananas.” Nik said like that was an explanation.
”But this is weird, right?”
”It’s not even a special blender.” Nik’s voice was quietly resigned.
Reed leaned back, settling on his heels. “I just feel like the rats that are too happy are kinda weird.”
Relenting, Nik sighed deeply, leaning an elbow on his knee and planting a fist on the side of his scraggly attempt at a beard. “Fine, it’s weird. So what? Something is making their lives better, though! This would be a lot easier if we could talk to the rats.” He froze slightly as he started flipping through the dungeontech database with his skulljack connection. “Can we talk to rats? Is that an option? I’m not finding anything but we need a better tag system.”
”We can’t talk to rats.” Reed couldn’t prove that, exactly, but he’d half made and half been assigned the job of having his finger on the pulse of this place, and he felt like he would have heard about the rat communicator if it existed. “What do you wanna do about the weird rats?”
Nik took a deep breath. “I mean, it’s been months. There’s no sign of adverse effects. I… I think we should move to sophont testing?” He tried to cloak how eager he really was to get a new mess mixed up in everything.
”We don’t even know what happened here. This is like saying that the Library ink slime that we’ve got in the fishtank out there hasn’t killed anyone all month, so maybe it’s time to lick it.” Reed replied with a frown that was mostly aimed at the confusion around the rats, and not the rats themselves. Also a little bit at Nik, but he didn’t want to stop watching the rats to glare at his fellow Researcher. “Besides. After that one Climb spell test ruined a week’s worth of sap, we don’t have a potion budget right now for this.”
”Hey, I didn’t ruin ‘a whole week’, I ruined like six succulents at most.” Nik shot back defensively, ignoring Reed’s attempt at the passive voice. “How about I test it? I’ll bet we can find a few other volunteers!”
”Davis found volunteers for the one that makes you blow up glass you touch, it’s not impressive that you can find volunteers for stupid shit around here.” It wasn’t that Reed didn’t love that about Research, but he also did want to temper it a little bit. Not everyone needed to go through emergency surgery or punch a warped hole in their ceiling just to try stuff out. He took a deep breath of the well filtered air down here in the potion section, and decided to not go too far with the tempering. “But fine. It hasn’t killed the rats. So go ahead and draft a testing plan and I’ll start scheduling medical observation.”
Both men started to nod at the world’s most content rats when they were interrupted by a hand thunking into the edge of the table, and James looming over both of them. Nik yelped and fell sideways to land sprawled on one of his legs, while Reed just tried to make his heart stop trying to escape through his throat and played it off as being cool and collected that he hadn’t even had time to react. “What,” James asked calmly, “are you two threats to national security doing?”
”Absolutely not mind control! Haha!” Nik scrambled up from the floor while Reed just grunted and pushed his heavier frame up on the edge of the table.
Brushing himself off, Reed frowned down at the rats. “Probably not mind control.” He said. “But if it is, it might be okay? I dunno, you spend a lot of time reading philosophy books right? Is mind control unethical if it’s willing and beneficial?”
”That… Reed, I’m here about the explosion, not for another existential crisis.” James palmed his forehead. “But also that’s a really interesting question!” His pitch rose as he tried to not get too into the conversation, and failed. “I mean, we’re using hypnosis to absorb the red orbs now, right? And it helps with the blues too! But even on a non-magical level, a lot of the same techniques are what gets used for cognitive behavior therapy which is critical for a lot of people in managing PTSD.” He leaned his back against the table, staring across the lab and the half dozen other rat enclosures as he waved a hand while talking. “And then there’s, like, Marlea. Who is sort of mind controlling herself? I dunno if that counts. There’s a broad way to think about this that I like, which is the alarm clock question. If you set an alarm to wake you up, and then you wake up, did the clock control you? And is it different if there’s no external clock, but just an internal compulsion?”
”I can sleep through an alarm.” Nik pointed out, scratching at his arm.
”Point is, we have a lot of methods of control that are external to ourselves. The only difference is that mind control would be more effective. And yeah, like you said, less ignorable.” James stopped, looking at the two Researchers with narrowed eyes. “What do you mean, it’s probably not mind control? And what does this have to do with the explosion?”
Reed opened his mouth, then closed it, before mentally checking his notifications. “Oh. Huh. Looks like something went wrong with one of the test turbines.” He said. “Oof. Three hurt, two of them Order, all non-critical. Looks like it happened at the testing site with the outside engineering people, so we didn’t hear.” He glanced at James. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to, you know…”
”No, I get it.” James gave a long exhale, realizing he hadn’t even thought to check the increasingly robust digital feed of information that the Order maintained. “So everything’s okay?”
”Well, a three hundred thousand dollar experimental turbine exploded…”
”But everyone’s okay?” James asked.
Nik laughed. ”Not the accountants.” He said, before fanning his hands defensively. “Yes, everyone’s fine, I realized as I was talking that there might be something that could hurt accountants via money, shut up.”
James hadn’t actually considered that, but he didn’t want to get bogged down in another long debate. “Please don’t nonconsensually mind control anyone.” He said with a tired sigh. “And please stop blowing up expensive equipment, we aren’t that rich.”
”Oh, we didn’t pay for it.” “It was their equipment.” The two men replied at the same time.
That didn’t make it better, and they knew it. ”That… oh, whatever.” James dropped it. “Also what is up with the rats?”
”They’re happy.” Nik said quickly.
James paused midway into navigating through the lab’s rows of tables. “I know about that part. And?”
Reed looked back at the rat enclosure. “No, that’s mostly it. We don’t know exactly why, but they’re having a great time. They don’t fight each other, they take care of themselves and each other, they spend a lot of time actively playing and trying out different new things introduced to the enclosure… they’re at peak rat happiness.”
”…I…” James felt his voice hitch slightly. “Can… okay. Have fun with the happy rats. I’ve gotta go.” He cut himself off before he could ask to be part of the human test subjects. He’d already had a pretty bad experience with a potion designed to cure his depression. Which made him stop and duck back into the lab when he put that information in context. “Actually, wait. If you do test this, you absolutely need to have skulljack support for whoever tries it. Because the last time…”
”Oh right, the inhabitors! Shit!” Reed’s eyes got wide as he stared down at the rats. “But they’re… hm. Okay. We can test for a few things. Nik, can you set up some time with the hospital’s X-ray?”
This time, as James left, he felt a lot better. Not perfect, but Reed and Nik taking it seriously was comforting. And now he could go do something a lot safer than hanging out in the potion lab; dungeon delving.
_____
Sarah was sitting partly on her living room couch, and partly on Auberdeen who was conveniently napping in the right spot to be a dog shaped cushion, when Alanna found her. Alanna slipped up behind her girlfriend with an exaggerated tiptoe that turned out to be stealthy enough to get by a distracted Sarah’s senses, and announced her presence by twining her arms underneath Sarah’s and wrapping her in a tight hug.
”Hey beautiful.” Alanna said as Sarah let out a shrill ‘eep’. “What’cha up to?”
”How are you so sneaky?!” Sarah asked as Alanna pulled her back into the couch, flushing as her girlfriend trailed soft kisses up her neck. “You make less noise than… uh…”
Alanna laughed. ”Yeah, we don’t really know many sneaky people, do we?”
Sarah ducked her head as Alanna let her go and circled the couch. “I would have thought of one! I just don’t evaluate people by their D&D class like James does.” Her eyes lit up and she intercepted Alanna before she could open her mouth. “Wait, of course! Any of the rogues! I bet Ben is sneaky! He hides from me all the time!”
”I… I kinda think Ben is worried about exploiting you, precious.” Alanna said sadly.
The problem with Ben was, he wasn’t human. Alanna corrected that thought as soon as she realized she’d had it. The problem with Ben’s situation was how his nonhuman characteristics interacted with his social life. If you were in the same room as Ben, then you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Ben was your best fucking friend. You’d known him for years, maybe your whole life. You could trust him with anything. There was no reason to think that Ben wasn’t supposed to be there, no reason to hold anything back, and no reason not to share whatever you had with him. And you would absolutely be certain that he was supposed to be there, doing whatever he was doing.
It faded with proximity, and also when Ben intentionally repressed it. But it could never be fully turned off. So far, only iLipedes and the weird ink crows from the Stacks hated Ben on sight, which was why he loved those species so much. His pet iLipede that actually tolerated his presence was the greatest victory Ben had ever had over his own nature.
In the context of how Sarah lived her life - as a ball of unstoppable friendship - Ben was understandably uncomfortable. He didn’t want to ruin how she loved living her life, and felt like his existence would do that be default. And, as it turned out, Ben was really fucking good at vanishing when he wanted to. Not in a magical way, he just… had an uncanny ability to not be in the room when you went looking for him. Or to slip out without being spotted.
Personally, Alanna suspected that he had gotten a list of the really good hiding spots from all the ratroaches that lived at the Lair and wanted spots they could escape to if needed. It would be easy for Ben, especially since he worked with Recovery for Sewer refugee onboarding already. Though he might be too heavy to hide on top of all the ventilation pipes down in the basements.
”Bah!” Sarah flatly rejected the idea that she would be offended by Ben’s presence. “I’ll get him eventually.” She vowed with a dramatic clench of her fist. “And to answer the actual first question, I’m doing math!”
”Ew. Why.” Alanna frowned. “Wait, no. Math is Anesh’s thing!”
”…other people are allowed to do math!” Sarah rolled onto her side, flopping next to Auberdeen’s floofy white form to stare up at Alanna. “We aren’t defined by our skillsets! And also Anesh is busy so I couldn’t ask him.” She admitted.
Alanna shook her head with a twisting smile that she was trying to cover up. “Nope! You make friends, I throw myself into danger, Anesh does math, James rescues people and then hires them, Dave makes terrible D&D character choices, and JP… uh…”
”Wait, no! Now I can’t even make a silly character? TQ and Cheha will be sad!”
”There are other people in our D&D game.” Alanna pointed out.
”Yeah, and Smoke-And-Ember won’t be sad!” Sarah grinned up at her, confident in her read on their party dynamics. Sarah had a lot of skill ranks in social skills, but she’d never really needed them to feel out other people. They just made her better at it, like how Alanna’s magical Empathy boost made her exceptional at keeping conversations from going bad. “Actually, what’s TQ’s thing? He’s been around for a while, you must have a thing for him!”
”Flirting with James and being depressed.”
”That’s not special either! That’s everyone’s thing!” Sarah announced, getting a low rumbling woof from Auberdeen as she persisted in interrupting the dog’s nap. “Sorry!” She stage whispered.
Alanna shook her head, smiling openly now, her heart swelling as she watched Sarah through two sets of eyes. In the physical world, the girl with her tangled hair spilling over a couch cushion and looking up at her with wide sparkling eyes was cute. A short, slim figure that moved with a confidence that left her never out of place. But through Alanna’s Empathy, Sarah was a roaring furnace of compassion and joy, painting everything around them in the colors of honest love. In one view, she was cute. In the other, she was beautiful. And Alanna was done pretending to ever be annoyed with the people she actually loved.
”Alright, alright. So what kinda math are you doing?”
Sarah’s vibrant energy darkened like a stormcloud, and a sigh came with it. “You know the box that makes paperclips?”
“Like, the thought experiment?” Alanna asked, before seeing that Sarah was staring at her blankly and realizing she was off base. ”Okay…no…?”
”From Officium Mundi. It’s a box of infinite paperclips. Didn’t you find it on the long delve?”
Alanna shrugged. “I found a lot of stuff. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t… I’m not dumb, but I promise you that smarter people in the Order are gonna find better uses for the magic items. Like you, apparently!” She paused, before clearing her throat dramatically. “Also I would have assumed that the old digital camera that takes notes on random stuff you photograph would have been the more useful one.”
”Well, I hate it.” Sarah groaned. “The box! Not… anything else you said! That camera sounds wild. But. Look, here.” She sat up and showed Alanna some of the papers she’d tried to sketch out geometry equations on. “The paperclips are all identical, and ‘normal’, whatever that means. They’re made of… uh… nickel coated galvanized steel wire.” Sarah read the last part in her ‘quoting something’ voice. “And the box never runs out.”
”Okay. Cool? I mean, infinite free steel sounds nice.”
”It does sound nice. It’s a lie. A terrible lie, inflicted on us by the grim specter of logistics!”
Alanna looked around the room. “Are we being haunted by James, too? This sounds like a James thing.”
Sarah softly rammed her head onto the paper notebook she was using with a dull thud. ”Look, the point is, it would take one point six quadrillion paperclips to cover the world’s yearly steel use.” She didn’t look up as Alanna made a conciliatory grunt and started rubbing at her shoulders, just relaxed into the touch of her girlfriend’s strong hands with a small squeak. “Mmmh. And we can copy the box!” Sarah explained when she decided to find her voice again. “It’s small enough! But the nickel needs to be separated in a special kind of furnace, I think? And we’d need a few thousand boxes turned upside down and never not pouring, and then trucks to carry it all away, and just so much infrastructure… and the boxes are made of thin cardboard! They might rip at any time, and that’s it! Poof, blue orb!” She made a content squeak as Alanna kept massaging her neck. “And… and… mmmh… the paperclips get stuck, and you have to shake the box… and…”
”This is why I leave this kind of thing to Karen or Texture-Of-Barkdust.” Alanna admitted. “Honestly anyone in Recovery is better at it than me. Them, or even just James.” She gave Sarah one last pat and stood up. “Do you have any idea how much reading and research James actually does? The fucker practically lives inside JSTOR some nights.”
Sarah slid down off the couch and under the table, rolling lithely between the legs of the familiar old furniture to pop up on the other side of their living room. “Yeah, he’s… he’s always been like that. He almost never talks about the work he puts in to get to conclusions, because he doesn’t want people to think less of him.” She said with a slight melancholy that Alanna only barely caught even with her enhanced sense.
”Huh. I never noticed.” She said with a frown.
“I barely noticed that, and I was his best friend for a lifetime. And yes, I know it doesn’t make sense. He’s a bit of dumb… dummy.”
Alanna smirked at her girlfriend, still reveling in the change in their relationship status. “You were about to call him a dumbass, weren’t you?”
“I can’t help it, you’re all bad influences on me! Corrupting my poor virgin ears!” Sarah swooned, fingers spread as she placed the back of her hand against her forehead and twisted her body backward.
Alanna laughed. ”Uh huh.” She said in pure disbelief.
”Don’t be mean to meeeee.”
Shaking her head, Alanna decided to move on to what she’d actually stopped by their home for. “Well anyway, James and I are going on a Stacks run. Wanna come?” She asked.
Sarah thought about it, only mostly dropping her pose. “Actually, kind of, yes? I hear a lot of cool stuff about that place! And I don’t need to be back for Clutter Ascent until tomorrow afternoon when it’s my shift. So that sounds like fun! When are you planning it for?”
”Oh, a couple hours.” Alanna admitted. “Yeah, if you wanna shower and change first, now’s the time to do it.” She raised her eyebrows with a sly grin as she shuffled closer to Sarah. “I could help!”
”…how many hours?” Sarah asked, face already bright red.
Alanna shrugged easily. ”Four or five?”
“Then yes, you can help.”
_____
James, Alanna, Sarah, and Arrush, all popped into existence on the second story of a library building that had only ever had one floor constructed. They were only going on a light search of the Ceaseless Stacks tonight, so they didn’t bring excessive backup, especially when there were so many different things the Order’s knights were working on. And besides, they were meeting Vadik and Jesse down here; the nominal keeper of this dungeon’s entrance, and his newly assigned assistant.
”Smells odd.” Arrush said instantly as their teleport left them standing among a thousand paperback works of art.
”And there is a hangup.” Zhu stated, a feathered limb unfurling like a cylinder around James’ arm as his tail folded into place behind them with an orange aura.
And, James realize, of the voices he could hear talking, one of them wasn’t familiar. He sighed as the group moved carefully out into the open central upstairs of the library, spotting Vad talking to an older man sitting at one of the tables.
His ally sighed in relief as James walked into sight. “See, there he is. You can ask him.” Vad raised a hand. “James! My boss wants to talk to you!”
”You could have called or warned us…?” James raised his eyebrows, caught off guard but trying to not be annoyed with Vad.
”Good evening.” The heavyset black man had a salt and pepper beard that looked less like a choice and more like he just gave up on shaving, especially when paired with the heavy bags under his eyes, visible even against his skin. He wore a pair of gold framed rectangular glasses and a sweater that Mr. Rogers would have been proud of, making him look the perfect part of a kind old librarian. “My friend Vadik here tells me that you are not stealing from our good little library?“
”Vad, status?” James said flatly before answering.
Vad swallowed heavily, but answered anyway. ”Capricorn.” The code word for “Not a threat, probably not affiliated with Blitzkrieg, please don’t blow up the building.”
”Excuse me.” The man sounded like he was offended that he was being ignored. The Texan accent in his voice really coming through strong as he got angry quickly. “Would you care to…“ He blinked in the dim after hours light of the library. “Young man, are you glowing?”
Zhu’s coiling manifestation paused, and then cohered more tightly against James’ skin as the navigator stopped preparing for a fight. He tilted his eye sideways, talking before James or Alanna could get a word in. “I’m glowing. Because I’m like that.” He said. “Hello! I’ve found a lot of boring people don’t get past this part.”
”…Zhu…” James brought a gloved hand up to pinch his nose. The one that didn’t have Zhu on it.
”Actually I’m kinda with him.” Alanna said, looking over her shoulder to where Sarah was waiting with Arrush, the big guy looking nervous. “This is only kinda funny. How long until the door?”
”Eight minutes.” Zhu supplied.
James nodded. ”Okay. Hello. Vad, care to introduce us?”
The other knight jerked upright. ”Right, of course. James, this is MacDowell Shoemaker, he’s the head librarian here. Boss, this is James Lyle. My… other boss.”
James resisted the urge to roll his eyes as the older man sighed in what felt like a mirror of his own exasperation. “And why are you bringing your friends in, after hours?”
”Oh, I can explain that.” James said easily. “The stairwell door back there goes to a different small world every week or so. It… Alanna get your feet off the table.” He interrupted himself as his girlfriend settled into one of the reading chairs and kicked her boots up. “Have some respect, this is a library. Anyway, there’s a whole enormous realm of hostile paper monsters and endless library shelves, and some other weird magic. And we or other people in our group go in every week.” He paused, searching the older librarian’s face and seeing none of the disbelief, alarm, or shock that he normally got with a pitch like this. “Uh…”
”You’re awfully calm for someone just learning about this.” Zhu said curiously.
MacDowell took a deep breath, pushing himself forward to settle his arms on the worn surface of the large reading table that he had sat Vad down at. “So it would seem.” He said distantly. “So, four of you this time, is it?”
”Six tonight, actually.” James said. “We’ve got a couple people hiding behind the bookshelves over there cause I didn’t want you to react badly to my boyfriend and spoil a first impression by me punching you or something.”
”Not every Texan is a bigot, don’t stereotype me you brat.” The librarian shot James a glare. He looked like he might have been about to say more, but Sarah chose that moment to shove a reluctant Arrush out from their cover, the ratroach weakly resisting her as she leaned into his back and tried to use every one of her scarce pounds of body weight as leverage. MacDowell watched as Vad just gestured toward them and James waved a hand like he was presenting a gameshow prize; one of the two expecting to be fired by the end of the night. “Ah.” The old librarian said. “Well, that’s new.”
”Wait, that’s new, but I’m not worth comment?!” Zhu demanded. “James, I’m offended. Threaten him with something for me!”
”…What… no!”
”Yeah, we don’t really have a lot to threaten people with.” Vad said sadly, like he was pining for the imaginary days when the Order tortured people or something.
From behind Arrush, Sarah peeked her head out. “Sometimes we give people jobs!” She said. “That’s like a threat!”
”Sure.” James nodded. “Anyway. There’s a door to another world, and we scout and raid it for magic that we use to try to fix problems.” He pushed himself off the table he was leaning against as Arrush tentatively slid closer to him, the ratroach following directions from Alanna’s small nodded gestures. “It’s not the only one, Arrush is from a different place.”
”Yours is nicer.” Arrush said with a wet rasp.
”Agreed.” Sarah chirped. “Also two minutes?”
The old man sighed. “Well. I know I can’t stop you, knowing how these things go. Especially not with your pet monsters there. But I would like to ask you to stay out of that place, even though I know you won’t listen.”
”…oh.” Arrush’s voice was a tiny sound of hurt.
Before James could jump to his defense, Vad smacked his boss with an open palm slap to the back of his head. “Hey!” His bark of anger cut through the chill of the air conditioned building. “You said you’d be polite! That’s over the fucking line. Apologize to my friend.” He demanded, stifling his own employeer’s complaints as he stabbed a finger in Arrush’s direction.
The man rubbed the back of his head, not noticing Alanna holding back laughter as she arrested her own lunge across the table. “I… no, you’re right Vadik. I apologize, I am being unreasonable.” He shivered slightly as he tried to meet Arrush’s eyes. “But I still don’t want you going through that door.”
”It’s alright, we’re professionals.” James reassured him
MacDowell smiled at him, a grandfatherly smile that was both caring and very, very tired. “I’ve heard that before.” He said. “Sooner or later, you won’t come back. There’s only one way to be safe from that, and it’s to ignore it.”
”…Uh, sorry. Hi. I’m Sarah.” Sarah raised her hand as she poked her head around Arrush. “If you felt like it was dangerous, why didn’t you tell someone?”
The man fixed tired eyes on her. “I did. I have. Friends, police, government, it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, they stop coming out.” He sagged backward. “You’re welcome to try. I’m just tired of seeing good people lose their lives.”
”Assuming they’re dead.” James rubbed his chin. “That’s… there’s a lot to talk about there.”
Vad nodded. ”There is. But also, we have been okay so far. Even I have, and I’ve had my arm half chewed off. And we were going in… nowish.”
”Mr. Shoemaker, would you like to come along?” Sarah asked suddenly. “It’s… not safe. But we actually are professionals at this specifically. And if you want to see inside, Vad and Jesse will be staying near the door, so…”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
”I… no.” The older gentleman shook his head vigorously. “No, I don’t think I will. But I will wait here for you kids, and pray for your safety.”
Zhu’s feathers fluttered excitedly against James’ armor. “Oh! Are you a cleric? I’ve never met one in real life, that’s really cool!”
”…Zhu… no he…” Sarah looked like she was about to die of embarrassment. “We’ll talk later. Ten seconds. Vad?” The knight swore in a language he wrongly assumed no one else knew, and scampered over to the door, followed by Arrush as the ratroach broke away from the rest of the group. The two of them, exactly on time, opening the double doors and putting stops on them to hold the portal in place. “Alright, I want an adventure! Let’s go!” Sarah put on a fabricated front of enthusiasm, and led the way with Alanna into the dungeon.
Before entering, James stepped up and wove his arm around Arrush’s custom fitted armor in a comforting hug, and as he did so, Zhu peeled back to give them a small privacy, forming a flared cloak of orange feathers along James’ back. “You wanna head back?” James asked in a whisper.
”No.” Arrush said with tense anger. “I don’t want him… I don’t want something that small to ruin things.”
”Fair.” He turned back to the librarian, who seemed to be avoiding looking through the breach in reality. “Last chance.” He offered.
James had found that a lot of the time, this method of introducing someone to the magical side of the world was sort of the equivalent of performing first aid with sticks and dirt. Not technically impossible, but it didn’t really work for most people. A lot of people were mentally brittle in a way that mixed badly with the massive infomorph structures around the world that shrouded the dungeons and their effects.
Bit by bit, the Order of Endless Rooms was working on damaging and toppling those memeplexes, but they were often huge things. Plus, only the infomorph population could actually see them, and even then, couldn’t always figure out the full size and shape of the constructs. All of that was on top of the potential for some kind of antimemetic background radiation that made it hard to remember dungeon stuff in general unless you were past a certain level of exposure.
So normally, he would have said there was a good chance the librarian wouldn’t retain much of this encounter. Would shove the Ceaseless Stacks and James and Arrush and everyone else out of his memory, and just act like everything was normal. But this was different.
The man knew about the dungeon. Had known about it the whole time, apparently. Had told other people, which meant Vad wasn’t the first one to find it. Wasn’t the first one to go in. He was just the first one to survive and get the Order of Endless Rooms involved. Or get involved with the Order of Endless Rooms, depending on how you looked at it. And now that his boss had found out, he wasn’t mad. He just didn’t want more people to die.
MacDowell had developed a very weird survival mechanism for the magical world. Not rejection of the ideas, but rejection of interaction. He was treating the dungeon like a wild bear; don’t approach it, don’t poke it, and don’t feed it, and you’d be fine. He was staying out of the line of fire, and it had kept him alive over apparently a lot of other people.
But it worked. James couldn’t deny that the librarian was alive, and the dungeon hadn’t killed him. All it took was not participating with the magic of the world.
That was a cost James wasn’t okay with. So he stepped with the others over the threshold, and into the Ceaseless Stacks. Even if it was dangerous. Maybe, maybe, especially because it was dangerous.
_____
”I always love this part.” Arrush whispered in his rasping voice, stepping to the front of the group and striding forward confidently, some of his distress disappearing. His custom fitted armor and belt of armaments and tools making him look perfectly at home as he stepped across the threshold and into the endless shelves and hundred foot high optical illusion ceilings of the Stacks.
Everyone had their favorite dungeons. For James and Sarah, it was Clutter Ascent. Alanna actually preferred Route Horizon, just because she loved the mythology of the combustion engine. But for Arrush, it was here. Among endless row after row of shelves stocked with false books, surrounded by the smell of clean dust and old paper, where everything was either brutally honest in its hostility or openly willing to chill for a bit and not fight. A place of wrought iron and whorled wood that felt all at once mysterious and honest. He loved it.
Arrush had heard that dungeons couldn’t possibly be real a surprising amount of times. So far, the Order was pretty sure that wasn’t correct, and Arrush agreed.
”Alright.” James’ voice made the ratroach’s heart hammer almost painfully in his chest. “Vad?”
“This way,” the younger librarian pointed to their right. “Stairs down, there’s a loooong hall we haven’t looked at yet. Jesse and I’ll set up as fallback for you. My legs hurt, I’m not running for my life tonight. And he needs to learn some basics anyway.”
James and Arrush traced a path forward where Vad had indicated, the others trailing behind. Sarah watched everything with wide eyed wonder as she stuck close at Alanna’s side, mostly focusing on the ceiling, which was the most visible part of the weird terrain from this angle. They hadn’t yet passed enough of the miles of bookshelf to feel like they were anywhere more than just a particularly expansive bookstore, but soon enough that would change.
Also Sarah kept feeling her eyes drawn to each aisle they went past, looking for more of the hermit crab stepstool creatures that lurked around here. There was one back at the Lair, and the thing seemed almost pathologically chill, so Sarah was really curious what they were like in the dungeon environment.
Sarah was curious about almost everything. This was just the current point of focus for her. The shellaxies from the Office had a similar pattern of behavior in their natural environment; sleepy lil guys that were often content to ignore everything around them. But under some circumstances, they would attack brutally and abruptly, both in and out of the dungeon. The ones at the Lair were used to people, but they were still kinda animals that didn’t have the benefit of a lineage of thousands of years of domestication. In contrast, the crablike critter from the Stacks was peaceful and curious basically all of the time. And Sarah was willing to risk getting her fingers bitten to see if that held true here in the dungeon itself.
It was hard to spot though, since at least for this early bit, they were moving fairly quickly.
The group kept a tight formation as they made a snappy walking pace. Partly because the Stacks weren’t that threatening here on the outer edge, but also partly because if you stood still long enough, some of the books near you on the end of the aisle would take notice and try to eat you.
Shelf after shelf passed by, the dungeon’s environment showing a strange mix of dark wood and beige metal as materials started mixing together in ways no human builder would have ever bothered with. For Sarah, who had never actually been here before, it was an almost painful experience to have to keep moving and not spend a half an hour poking around at the different sights.
But she knew that her friends were leading her somewhere much cooler than just a two mile long hallway where soon enough the shelves were on both sides, despite the fact that to their right there ‘should’ have been the real world library. So Sarah kept close, and alert to more than just the creatures she was keen to spot.
Half a mile of quick walking later, when some of them were really starting to feel like they were getting a good workout, Vad called a halt. “Here.” He whispered, pointing down between a row of shelves.
James and Arrush moved to the end points, James forcing himself to remember that just because the little sign said ‘biology’ didn’t mean any of the books could teach him anything, and looked down the row. It was maybe two and a half feet wide, quiet as anything else in here, with a couple of hanging cone lights overhead that swayed in tiny motions in the slight breeze. Thick hardbacks were stacked up on the shelves in uneven piles; no cleanly organized library, this. Arrush tapped James from across the narrow aisle with the small arm that extended from his back, and pointed the tip of his muzzle down at the single book he’d just seen twitch as it tried to appear innocent.
At the end of the narrow passage, there was a chipped wooden banister that walled off what looked like a basement staircase. Unlike the grand sweeping stairs that the Ceaseless Stacks had connecting its various balconies and landings, this looked like it belonged in a very specific run down Masonic lodge that James remembered his grandpa taking him to when he was eight years old, where he got lost trying to find the bathroom.
”Hang on.” Sarah’s spoke in a quiet tone, but not a whisper, experience as a delver letting her know that a whisper was often louder in a quiet environment like this. She took a few steps back and looked down the previous row of shelves. “That staircase isn’t here.”
”Yeah, we found it pretty much by accident.” Vad admitted. “It’s only here. It’s safe though, just a tight fit.” He stacked up behind Arrush while Alanna got into position behind James. “You two, stay back. There’s been about five to ten snappers here every time we’ve checked. Stay away from the other rows.”
”You have told me that every time. “ Jesse said. Their hands were practically vibrating as they stood in the middle of the group; footage of dungeons meant that they hadn’t been surprised, and they’d been into the Stacks once before, but this really was a weird thing, and even being prepared didn’t make the position of new delver any easier.
James and Arrush weren’t listening. The two of them, with Alanna as backup and Vad watching their rear for any problems, bolted forward single file into the terrible environment for a fight. Which was a shame, because out of every dungeon life species they’d ever encountered, the books in here were possibly the most hostile. Even Office-influenced camracondas would show tactical restraint, even if they were planning on killing you eventually.
The first book, bound in a cracked brown cover, lurched off the shelf at James’ legs with a bookmark tongue lashing across a row of razor sharp teeth. It had taken about three steps before they started to attack, before James could even offer peaceful passage. The books were like very territorial wolverines, and the Order tried their best to just avoid them and let them be their vicious animal selves far away from anyone they might want to hurt. It didn’t work, though. They’d hunt outsiders like they were hungry for the blood of the living.
James twisted, letting the book strike ineffectively on his thigh, before shoving it back and keeping up his own forward pace, letting Arrush plant a clawed foot on the thing and carefully rip into it as he walked behind James. More books woke up at the noise, shifting and cracking their papery maws as they looked down from the metal shelves at the two, no hesitation between spotting prey and attacking. But James and Arrush had done this a few times, and they maximized what they could of the cramped environment, both of them working together to intercept and disable individual books before they could get swarmed. James only had to use a single cast of Pave to snap one in half at the end before they ran out of incoming hostiles.
”All clear!” He called back.
”Wow, they really are as mean as you said.” Sarah gnawed at her lower lip as she watched Alanna quickly and efficiently pluck yellow orbs out of the bodies of the attacking creations.
Her amazonian girlfriend nodded briskly. “Yup. They’re the least ethically problematic combat targets we have, honestly.”
”I feel like you’re learning but you’re learning the wrong lessons.” James snorted. “Oh hey, Sarah and Jesse, the tradition!” He tried to offer each of them a yellow orb, but had to wait until they had gotten their whole group through the cramped hall.
Jesse took the orb, but gave James a guilty look standing on the other side of the bannister as James waited for them on the top of the creaky wooden staircase. “I’ve actually already…”
”It’s fine! And I’m excited!” Sarah popped hers instantly. “Yes! Danaus plexippus!”
”I have no idea what that means.” Alanna told her as she cracked her own orb and got a species rank in South American gophers. “But I’m excited that you’re excited?”
”It’s a monarch butterfly. Which actually might legitimately make Sarah the first person to get a first orb that she likes. Or, does it count as a ‘first orb’ if it’s the first one from this dungeon? I know for a fact you use Office yellows, because you were talking breathlessly about the history of flags at breakfast yesterday.” James said, using his own yellow orb. They didn’t tend to save the Library yellows that often; they still had a huge backlog of them to copy for testing, and given how violent the guardians here could be, it seemed unlikely they were going to run out. Which was why he didn’t feel any real guilt as the tiny little ball in his fingers popped like a grape.
[+1 Species Rank : Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla]
Arrush, having just picked up a rank in a specific type of ant he’d ask about later, saw the puzzled look on James’ human face. “Are you hurt?” He asked with a set of soft clicks in his chest.
”Uh… no, I think mine’s broken. It just said ‘gorilla’ three times.” James looked down at his hand with a worried frown. If dungeon orbs were glitching, the Order was about to have a real fucking serious problem.
”Oh! I know this one!” Sarah said. “Silverback gorilla! It’s funny cause it’s family, kingdom, and genus are all ‘gorilla’. So its scientific name is gorilla gorilla gorilla.” She took a breath of dusty dungeon air. “That’s harder to say than I thought.”
James relaxed, practically feeling his biology Lesson advancing by a point as he processed that. “Okay, cool.” He said with a grin. “Well. Let’s get downstairs and see what the dungeon has for us, shall we?”
The entrance cleared, the group descended single file down the wooden stairs that felt like they were about to collapse under them, emerging into a contradictory marble floored atrium dotted with small tables and plush armchairs, stacks of paperback books, and a single dominating librarian’s desk. With its back to a railing that looked down over mile after mile of shelf.
Despite only having gone down maybe fifteen feet of stairs, the ceiling here was a vaulted cathedral dome. Stained glass and banded iron making a confusing mess of the overhead, with light seeming to shine through from sources that couldn’t exist, casting the whole region in a dim and slightly off color glow.
A frantic scratching of something gouging into wood split the air as the group emerged from the cramped stairs, and James caught sight of the tail end of one of the folded paper cats - catalogs, he liked to call them - bolting from where it had been resting on the surface of the desk. A twisting coil of a paper tail vanishing over the edge of the rail, and the sound of bounding impacts reaching his ears as it darted across the top of the shelves below.
”This place looks so cool.” Sarah said in a hushed voice. “The video doesn’t show it right. It’s so open.”
Arrush shifted next to her. ”The ceiling is a trick.” He told her in his raspy voice. “For most humans, anyway. It looks smaller than it really is.”
”Smaller?!” Sarah’s incredulous question was offset by the ear to ear grin she wore as she craned her neck up to try to understand the bizarre geometry she was standing under.
”Smaller. “ Arrush nodded as he whispered back, staring up himself. He loved how it looked, even if he could see through the trick. Maybe especially because he could see through it, his myriad eyes making the illusion ineffective against him.
Over past the dominating desk, Vad was pointing out stuff one level down below to James. From there, they had a panoramic view of hundreds of different shelves, miles of territory with almost no obstruction, and so a good opportunity to map out a path for the delvers that could hit a few points of interest. Jesse stood with them, looking like they didn’t know what to do with their hands, fiddling with the unfamiliar armor in the way that new delvers tended to do until they got used to how these things went. Alanna just leaned on the railing on the other side, her eyes tracking for anything moving, and making sure nothing was going to surprise them down there.
The Ceaseless Stacks was a hard dungeon not to love. It was often dangerous, often hostile, but it had a kind of quiet honesty to it. And, unlike a lot of other dungeons, it smelled pleasant. Cedar and paper, ink and dust, nothing overwhelming, just a nice place to be. If there was nothing to fight and no magic to collect, James and Arrush still would have shown up to take long walks here.
But there was magic to find. And so after making sure the landing was safe, James, Zhu, Arrush, Sarah, and Alanna descended via rope ladder into the depths below.
To see what they could find.
____
A long time ago, James had asked one of the catalogs about finding a new orb type, partly on a hunch, partly just because he was incapable of not trying to talk in stressful situations.
It had, oddly, answered. All catalogs would answer if you asked for help finding something, actually. They were helpful. And then, once they’d answered, they’d escape. James had a suspicion that it was a unique magic to them; they fed off of providing information, and turned it into motion somehow.
The point was, he’d found how to find green orbs. They tended to show up in water features, which were sparse in the Ceaseless Stacks. The place didn’t even have drinking fountains. But sometimes, it would have small pools or gentle waterfall walls, and sometimes it would have odd areas where the shelves fell back and left a hollow zone with a big globe statue and a large basin of water underneath it. That last kind was basically a guaranteed green orb.
It was still weird to James that the Office and the Library dropped the same color spread of orbs. It was also kind of annoying that they did different things. Office greens improved a space, often in impossible ways. They liked permanent spatial contortion, daily additions of things, and increased ‘value’. Library greens gave you material ranks.
As with every Library orb, one of its ranks was a flat improvement to learning speed with the given thing. Material ranks were some of the weirdest, because they seemed to speed up how quickly you could learn any kind of useful skill that worked with one of them, even if it wasn’t really the ‘intended’ material. As long as it was what you were training with, you got faster. The Order had a few custom made melee weapons made out of wrapped industrial sapphire just for training purposes, to go with one of the copied orbs.
The thing was… if you were actually polite to a catalog, they would give you more than the pure information you asked for. They’d editorialize, suggest, hint, advise. Sometimes they were coy, or outright capricious. But the one James had gotten that first set of directions from had warned him about the thing that lived on the globe. It had called it something dramatic, and his memory wasn’t good enough to remember exactly, but he was pretty sure it was a midnight baroness.
James’ shoulder hit the wood floor as he flung himself behind a pile of patently false encyclopedias. At any other time, he would have mourned the loss of the incoherent dungeon worldbuilding contained within those noble tomes. But right now, he was just glad they were thick enough and heavy enough to absorb the ink spikes being fired his way by the screaming orbs that hovered over the billowing form of the baroness. Three spikes traced across the ground where he’d been standing, one clipped his calf armor and would have sheared his leg off if he’d not been wearing it, and four more embedded in the book wall that James had sheltered behind.
He didn’t stay there. He had to keep moving, and a hard shove launched him to a crouch and then a dash with an easy exertion as he kept dodging and drawing attention.
On the other side, Alanna spun like a dancer as she dodged a stray shot sent her way, grabbing Sarah as she did so and twisting both of them just out of the path of the missile. Sarah was having a hard time not laughing; not because she was having fun but because it was just her panic reaction to nearly being killed.
They’d been ambushed by level geometry again somehow. After dropping down into this sublevel of shelves and displays and hanging lamps, it had been a fairly smooth dungeon delve for a while. Not easy, but they’d seen some cool stuff, and nothing had killed them. The living wrought iron lamp with a glowing golden flame in it’s ‘chest’ had been as cute as it was dangerous, and they hadn’t even fought that one, just snuck some of the blue orbs out of its nest and run. The hanging vines that were actually torn up unrolled scrolls had been a cool touch that had made parts of the dungeon feel a lot less ‘American’, even if some of them had tried to choke the team to death. The bit of the floor that was only the optical illusion of sturdy wood had been easily dealt with by Arrush, but lowering people down to grab the purple orbs at the bottom without falling in and dying to the razor-sharp edges was a trick.
And after all of that, they’d turned a corner, and found themselves facing one of these things. One of the massive floating stone globes, with a shadowy creature pretending to be a cloud system for the miniature world screaming trivia questions at them and trying to kill them. And all the rows of shelves leading away just led back into the room. James loved Scooby Doo as much as the next child of the nineties, but this was a little much.
From James’ shoulder, Zhu yelled out the answer to one of the questions the auxiliary gunner spawns were shouting out. Something about seatbelts, James was a little busy running and ducking past a desk to process it, but it must have been right because the construct flattened down to a thin line, and stopped shooting at them. Ahead of James, Arrush picked out another question and answered it uncertainly, not getting close enough to ‘close’ the incoming barrage, but still slowing it as he wasn’t technically wrong.
They were trying really hard to not have to shoot this thing. Gunfire in the Stacks was a terrible idea, almost every time. And that meant disabling all the parts of it that were coalescing bullets out of their inability to answer questions about local populations, historical figures, and the dates of wars that involved maybe a couple hundred people at most.
James followed the lines Zhu painted for him, maneuvering through shots as he played defense, his attention narrowed down to just not getting hit while the others picked out questions and fired off answers like their own return assault. He’d been hitting the thing with [Pave] every time it turned away from him, and while he’d run his Velocity dry, he’d certainly gotten its attention.
Crossing paths with Alanna and Sarah, the duo flickered across his vision and they used [Move Person] to get clear of the sweeping fire that was chasing at James’ heels; at the very least the baroness sucked at leading shots. James had played enough space combat games as a kid to know that was important.
The baroness seemed to agree. Planting a pair of smoky claws on its globe somewhere over a continent that definitely wasn’t Africa, it reared forward, the remaining two launchers tethered to its back suddenly amplifying the volume of their cries before spraying out a shotgun spread of projectiles James and Zhu’s way.
The navigator had a moment of panic. There wasn’t a clear path out. By virtue of his nature and their training together, Zhu knew every bit of maneuvering that James could do. He knew how to map out a route and guide a dodge through the worst situation. But not this one, because the incoming shot was an unavoidable cage.
James didn’t know what Zhu was thinking. But when every one of the guiding orange lines in his vision winked out at once, he managed to keep his calm. Instead of trying to dodge, which would have been stupid - he was a human, not a navigator; if the person who was good at something told you that it wasn’t gonna work you didn’t try anyway, you tried something else - he stopped exactly where he was. Didn’t even bother to pivot to face the incoming strikes. And then he let out Breath.
Mountain Of The Self was, technically, a spell made from his own personal magic and his connection to it through how it had kept him alive and propelled him forward. This did nothing for James in terms of a discount on the cost of it though. It didn’t change anything, it just made it emotionally interesting. Which was a shame because at a cost of twenty four Breath a second, he could only hold it for twelve seconds at most before running out of the mana, or, more realistically, two seconds before beginning to experience hypoxia and potential brain damage.
Of course, a spike of congealed high velocity ink through the skull would also cause brain damage. So he picked his poison, and braced for impact.
He didn’t need to. The spell stopped anything from altering him. For the brief second and a half that he held it active, his body was inviolate. A half dozen spikes hit him, and detonated into splatters of ink as the force of the impact was pushed back through them, unable to transfer anywhere else. One even nailed him in the eye, which was definitely something that made him flinch, and possibly scream. James was pretty sure it didn’t matter how modified and magical he ever became; a thing slamming into his eyeball, even if it didn’t hurt, was always gonna freak him out.
Given clear air to focus on the words being thrown around and not the projectiles, the others answered the last couple rapid questions about the percentage of Earth’s population that lived in Europe, and the date of the invention of peanut butter, and got close enough on both to finish slamming closed the projectile shooters. Which still actually left a midnight baroness, a creature that was larger than everyone in the room put together, with glowing smoke for eyes and claws that dug into the stone it was perched upon. Disabling its missile weapons hadn’t killed it.
But it didn’t get off the globe. Didn’t keep attacking. Instead, it watched them with wary eyes, especially as they formed up into a loose vanguard so their shield bracers overlapped with the last few charges that they hadn’t spent on this fight. And the delvers watched back.
”R-rude thing.” Arrush gasped out as he panted for breath, half his hands holding combat knives in straining grips.
”Well we did walk into its house.” Sarah offered in a shaky voice, still trembling from actually being in a fight like that. She was a good delver, but she was used to smaller things. Not this. And never so unexpectedly.
James didn’t say anything, just focused on trying to breathe, feeling the weight of his armor and the shifting form of Zhu’s feathers and tail balancing him out as he struggled to stay upright. Climb spells really took it out of you, if they used too much Breath.
The standoff lasted for a few minutes, with the delvers slowly catching their breath and recovering their composure, and the baroness watching them cautiously. Until eventually, Alanna moved, stepping out from the group, tapping James and Arrush on the shoulders as she passed by, but not moving so far to the side that she forced the creature to choose who to look at.
”We’re gonna grab the orb in the pool down there,” she told it calmly, not really sure if it understood but wanting to offer a passive tone anyway, “and then get out of here.” She kept advancing, her hands out and open. The creature scrambled back slightly, claws cutting into the floating globe, but it didn’t move to attack her. “No worries. Just a bunch of peaceful raiders, here for a weird ball. No worries.”
For a moment, James was terrified that the thing was going to lunge at her. But then he saw Alanna’s shoulders untense, and he realized she was Empathy reading the baroness. Maybe the Library creation had some corner case where it didn’t feel things normally, or maybe it went blank right before it attacked, maybe a lot of things. But Alanna seemed to feel like it was going to sit there and let her poke around under its nest.
And she was right. It took her about two minutes of splashing around, while the massive creature pulled itself up to the top of the globe and avoided her like a human would avoid a particularly active spider on the floor.
When she came back to their group, soaked up to her knees and elbows, she was grinning wildly. “Find something fun?” James asked with a return grin.
”Oh yeah.” Alanna showed off her prize. Eight orbs. Eight. One of them almost three times the size of the others. “I even left some there, just in case it needs them.” She waved at the creature, as the group slowly backed off.
”It tried to shoot us.” Arrush gave a wet cough as he spoke.
Alanna shrugged. “Eh. You technically tried to kill James at least twice. I’ve kinda gotten used to this style of things.”
Next to her, Sarah gave a still slightly nervous wave to the big smoky beast, before the group moved into the rows of bookshelves, and this time, didn’t just loop back around to where they’d started. “This way is better.” She said definitively. “If we don’t have to kill something, we shouldn’t. And maybe she’ll remember us for next time!”
”That… sounds like something that could backfire spectacularly.” James cleared his throat as he and Arrush took point again, leading them quietly through halls and aisles. He checked his skulljack timer, and found they were approaching the safety limit, so the group opted to head back to the exit now rather than push it. “I’m imagining it stalking us now.”
”The last thing that stalked us out of the dungeon runs operations for our rogue division.” Alanna reminded him.
”Mh.” James answered, staring alertly forward and saying nothing else.
Alanna glanced at him over her shoulder from where she was watching their formation’s flank. “You okay?”
”You are… upset.” Arrush spoke bluntly, not taking his eyes off a stumpy wooden shelf stacked with books that were covered in what looked like paper moss. He was trying really hard to participate in the dungeon banter thing the others liked, but he was also intently interested in both the things around them, and whether or not those things were going try to eat them. “Why are you upset? You have been upset this whole time.” He asked James. “You aren’t hurt?” He’d be able to smell the blood if James was hurt, he was pretty sure, but it didn’t hurt to ask.
”He’s not hurt. I am though!” Zhu declared, fanning out a newly growing wing off of James’ left shoulder, which had a hole clean through it leaking orange and silver motes. “This is going to be annoying.” He declared.
James snorted a laugh at his friend’s comment. “Nah, I’m fine. I’m just… every time we run into something… something like that. A fight or a challenge or whatever, I’m just thinking on what the guy told us… uh… Shoemaker. Vad’s boss.”
”That people come in, and then die?” Alanna said. “So what? We know dungeons are dangerous.”
“Yeah. Well. I wanna talk to him more. Because he made it sound like he knew other delvers, not just random people going in. And if something eventually got them…”
”You’re worried.” Sarah said softly, with a sad smile off into the two mile long straight line of head height bookshelves they were turning into and making progress down. “Which is good.” James actually paused at that to give her a questioning look. “It is. It’s good. You know why?”
”No…” He said slowly.
”Because good delver teams still die.” Sarah told him in that same softly sad voice. “Because we haven’t seen everything. It only takes one camraconda or one Ben or one something, right?” She stopped, leaning a hand on the end of a shelf just underneath a copper sign carved with the word trout. Alanna and James both stepped toward her at the same time, before James shot his girlfriend a ‘go ahead’ kind of nod and made himself busy keeping watch while they took their short break. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come in here.” Sarah said in a trembling squeak of a voice. “This… this might be a bad idea. I want to go home.” She whispered as Alanna wrapped her in an armored hug.
“Okay.” James answered instantly. “We can do that. Take your time, we’re getting out right now. It’ll be okay.”
”Yeah, and if a Ben shows up I can punch them for you.” Alanna chose what she believed was the funniest of Sarah’s examples to home in on. “But yeah, you putting it that way… it feels better.” She told Sarah.
”Better?!” Her girlfriend almost snapped. As close as any of them had ever heard Sarah to being furious.
Alanna nodded, not letting go of the hug. “Yeah. You know? Because if it’s just new problems coming up and catching people off guard… okay. Sure. That happens in real life anyway. We can handle problems. You know what I prefer?” She asked rhetorically. “I prefer the old man as a bitter dude who’s seen too many people get themselves killed. I prefer that over the alternative, which is that all delvers have an arbitrary lifespan. What’s worse for us; some kind of do-or-die test like a camraconda…? Or… just death, because the dungeon decides it?” Alanna shrugged.
”I choose camraconda.” Arrush said, trying to participate. “But… we make friends with them. So I’m cheating, and choosing the answer that’s good for me.” He tilted his angular head down at the floor, before looking back up, faceted eyes glinting in the Library’s light. “And good for the camracondas. Th-that’s why it works.”
“Yeah, that might shoot MacDowell’s whole existential despair in the foot.” James admitted. “The fact that all the stuff that would be delver filters tends to end up living in our home base, and dating other members of the Order, sorta makes me feel better when I say it that way.”
”That reminds me!” Sarah said, trying her best to push herself into a functional state of mind. “How are two of my favorite people doing now that you’re dating? I wanna know!”
”Wow, that’s some emotional whiplash.” Zhu commented from James’ arm, watching the ceiling overhead for anything sneaking up on them. “That was like conversational g forces.”
”Yeah, can we go back to the existential dread for the remainder of this walk?” James asked as they started moving again, red creeping up his cheeks as they checked their position and oriented toward the hanging rope ladder that would bring them back ‘upstairs’ and back to where Vad and Jesse were set up and waiting for them.
”No.” Arrush said, shaking his head as his paws started to pull knives out of the sheathes built into his armor. “Because there is a floating book approaching us.”
James let out a relieved huff. He actually didn’t mind talking about their relationship, he just didn’t want to do it now. And it was really handy of the dungeon to provide a little interdictionary when he needed it.
He didn’t say that pun out loud, but he was smiling wildly to himself as the drifting hive-like creature locked onto them and the fight started. And afterward, everyone was a little more tired, so the conversation got dropped until they were actually out, and off getting dinner together, in what James realized was kind of the weirdest double date he’d ever been on.
_____
They hadn’t really discovered that much new, that night. But every delve was progress. Mapping and exploring, learning bit by bit. Sometimes, it just… wasn’t anything major. Sometimes it was just work, albeit risky and sometimes very dangerous work.
But a day later, the greens and purples they brought back had copies of them made in the Office, and James split them with the rest of the group for the test run. Zhu got a material rank in foam, which was funny, while Arrush got one in uranium, which was either useless or useful but in a way no one wanted to consider. Sarah picked up material ranks in wool and nylon, which was suspicious but not enough to actually feel like it was targeted.
Alanna was the other person besides James to use the purples, and so picked up a tool rank in 1996 Ford Mustang convertibles, which confirmed that the dungeon thought of cars as tools, and didn’t exactly confirm but did make Alanna declare that it had taste. Before anyone could figure out if she was being sarcastic or not, she’d used her other orb for a material rank in cardboard.
And then there was James. He always loved this part, even though he refrained from just slamming down every orb he came across. He still liked the feeling, liked the implication that there was constantly active magic just making him a little bit better over time. Especially he liked how there was always a chance that there was going to be some kind of synergy, some kind of interaction that would really help catapult him forward and make his job as a paladin even easier. And it was with that hope in mind, and a happy smile, that he’d cracked the big green and the leftover purple, recording the results to see if they were something the Order was going to want to keep in its own growing library of magic.
[+1 Tool Rank : Wire Brush]
[+3 Material Ranks : Keratin]
“…Hey Arrush…”
“Mmh?” The big ratroach looked up from where he was carefully writing with one of his ancillary paws, dutifully noting down what he’d gotten and which labeled orb it had been from. The two of them were sort of by themselves; there were people around, but their spot at the end of the Lair’s front counter was out of the way and the others had all left to go take care of other stuff for the day. “Yes?”
”You’re scheduled for the shaper surgery soon, right?” James asked quietly.
”…yes.” Arrush replied through an almost overwhelming burst of anxiety at the reminder.
”Right. Sorry. Hey Tino!” James called down the counter. “I need one of the other copies of the big green!” He turned back to Arrush with a reassuring smile. “I know I can’t do a whole hell of a lot to help or make it not scary. But I’ve got at least one thing for you that’ll make part of it easier.”
Sometimes, the dungeons gave them the power to change the world. Sometimes they handed out violations of physics that were as valuable as they were volatile. Sometimes they felt so dangerous and so unhelpful that it didn’t seem worth it.
But sometimes, times like today, they gave out something that James found a million times more valuable.
They gave him ways to help. Not in the abstract, not eventually. To help, right now, someone he had decided he loved, and who needed it.
And then later also in the abstract and a bunch of other people too. But that was for tomorrow. For today, he’d settle for giving Arrush a little more control of his new body, when that happened in the near future. And he’d thank the dungeon the next time they were in it, for the magic.