“You are feverish. You are deadly ill. You are breathing. And you are alive. You are fighting an infection and winning.” -Jace Beleren, Bring The End Pt 1-
_____
Being taken prisoner was a weirdly novel experience for James.
He’d been sort of a prisoner of the hiring manager thing back in Officium Mundi, for, like, three minutes. Right up until Alanna had put his body in a headlock and ripped the skulljack out. He’d been trapped in the Stratified Underburbs, too, but that was like being trapped in the middle of the amazon rainforest. You weren’t a prisoner, you were just in trouble.
When the shapeshifter pretending to be Deb had hit him in the back of the head, James had been about to fight back, before realizing they weren’t trying to outright murder him. Which was good, because he felt drained, to such a degree that he wasn’t sure he’d win that fight. But he also wasn’t unconscious, so he’d played along and let himself be dragged out the basement back door, and then into a car where he had his hands badly zip tied. By the soft swearing of not-Deb, and the sounds he was hearing, they’d only just barely dodged the shield team and the rest of James’ companions.
But he didn’t try to get away. He felt exhausted and limp, and there was every chance that he’d end up shot in the back if he tried to run now. So he tried to get comfortable on the car’s seat without showing that he was awake, as the shapeshifter gingerly took corners and tried to pretend that they weren’t fleeing a crime scene.
And then James got what he was secretly hoping for. The digital bloop noise of the car’s fancy speaker system, and then the ringing of a phone call being placed. ”Hey. It’s me. Tangerine. Hey, shut up!” The driver snapped out in Deb’s slightly incorrect voice as the man they were calling started to greet them. “Everything went wrong.”
”Everything?” The man - a vaguely familiar voice James placed as someone from the conspiracy meeting he’d spied on - replied. “How bad? And why are you a woman?”
”They just appeared. Out of thin air! The miracle let us get the jump on them, but then the guns stopped working, and… and… and!” The shapeshifter’s borrowed voice cracked and they slammed on the brakes, sending James rolling onto the floor in a position that hurt the fuck out of his back as he was pressed into the center console of the car. “The brown kid shot Fish in the head. And they had their demon there, and I think it cut Mark’s head off. I don’t know if anyone else is alive!”
”Where are you?”
”Driving!” The shapeshifter cackled a scared laugh. “I kidnapped one of them, Russ! I don’t know what I’m doing!” They looked back at James, laying sideways on the floor of their car now. “What do I do?”
There was a pause. “Bring the fed to me. We can lock him up and get some answers. Maybe trade for anyone still alive from this complete disaster.”
”I’m sorry.”
”Not yet you’re not.” Came the coldly enraged reply. “Stop wasting time. And make sure you disarm him before you bring him inside.”
The call ended, and the driver changed course, muttering a repeated “Oh god, oh god” in a panicked copy of Deb’s voice as they drove. And again, James was reminded that their enemies were people, and not just mindless automatons. This was someone. Someone who was terrified of violence, scared of death, and broken by the deaths of their friends.
Of course they’d also been trying to do exactly those same things to James and his companions, so his sympathy was limited. “Zhu.” He whispered slightly as the engine revved and covered his voice. He wasn’t actually very good at dipping down low enough in his thoughts to talk to his navigator in his mind, which was definitely something James should practice for exactly this situation. “Zhu? You awake?”
”Where are we?” Zhu muttered, his dusty orange glow quickly concealed by James before it could give them away in the sinking evening twilight.
”Captured.” James whispered back, trying not to whimper as he blinked and his eye squished around the leaking rupture in it. It hurt so much, it made him delirious when he wasn’t focusing, which was probably why he hadn’t noticed that Deb wasn’t really Deb as he was led away to the basement to be taken prisoner. It also might be why he was making the terrible decision to go along with this, but at the moment, he was having a hard time feeling like he had any other options, even though he sorta knew this one was stupid. “Can’t move. Hide my gun and bracers under the seat.”
Zhu didn’t hesitate, instead starting to wiggle the Walther out of James’ holster in the smallest movements possible. “How did you get into this.” He spoke half in James’ head, keeping his actual voice quiet.
James didn’t reply. He didn’t have the mental bandwidth available for banter right now, which would have been terrifying if he hadn’t slipped and lost the ability to be concerned about things like that too. Instead, he tried his best to take stock of what he had on him, and what his options were.
He had several backup telepads, because he was done fucking that up, but if his attempt to run with Keeka earlier was any indication, he’d been tethered again, and couldn’t risk more pain and possibly damage right now. The bracers were mostly depleted by the gunfight anyway, and he wanted them stashed because he absolutely could not risk an enemy faction getting ahold of leveler items. And his gun would be stolen anyway, so he’d rather put it somewhere he could more easily retrieve it, since the gun bracelet he was wearing still had… about two months left before it could rebind. James let Zhu slip that off him too, since his armor was already being shoved to the side anyway.
What he had that would help was a shorter list. He had a stress ball from Officium Mundi in his pocket that he had to refrain from fiddling with because it made people feel surprised, he had a pocket with one of the skirmish winner seizes blades statuettes that he hadn’t found a reasonable time to use yet, he had his phone, and by association, anything the Order had emailed to their shared emergency gear account. Thought his phone would probably get stolen too, unless Zhu could conceal it for him.
He also had his internal magic. A couple uses of the spell from around here that made a towel, either one or two charges of Move Person left, enough Velocity slowly ticking up to use a single Pave. And his Breath was back what he felt like was around a hundred or so. James had a very high Breath cap from the long delve, and while it could take a little while to tick back up, it did it basically automatically. He’d just… panicked a bit, and used more Mountain of the Self than he should have during that fight. Which might also have contributed to why his head hurt. But he could cast, and that gave him options.
On the other side of things, he was hurt.
He was almost certainly going to lose some function in his eye on a permanent level. Not the whole thing, he hoped, but there was enough damage there that it would never work right again. Or at least, it wouldn’t until Deb and the dedicated part of Research that worked with her found a way to fix it. Or until James got shaper substance treatment. Or until he stumbled across some life changing purple orb by complete accident. Right now, though, there was still a bullet lodged in his face, and fluids that were supposed to be inside of him dripping down his cheek and chin. A shooting pain that wasn’t fading coming back in full every time he blinked or tried to look at something, gnawing at his ability to plan.
The bleeding was already slowing though. Endurance and purple orb enhanced blood working to keep him from dying by inches. And James took a second to be appreciative of the boost he had that made his eyes harder to break, because he was almost certain that if that wasn’t part of his enhancement list that the bullet would have done far worse to him. He also hoped they’d be able to buy that one spellbook off of the gentleman thief in the area, because suddenly, seeing normally out of one eye sounded a lot more important.
James tried to keep his breathing steady, relying on the driver’s panic and inexperience to keep from being noticed. He knew it didn’t help, but he focused on healing, on pushing the pain back. There was no magic in him that would actually do that, but he needed to be ready to act in a moment if it turned out he’d miscalculated. So he tried to compose himself, while Zhu wiggled his bracer clasps open and pulled the things out under the rear seat of the car.
Soon enough, the vehicle came to a jerking stop, and James played at being unconscious again as the driver’s door opened and slammed shut with too much force. Shortly after, one of the rear doors opened too, and he was awkwardly hauled out; and he hoped that he didn’t give the game away when he twitched his neck to avoid hitting his head on the bottom of the door.
”What the hell, is this guy even alive? He’s got a bullet in his face.” A voice asked with obvious concern.
”He’s breathing. Bishop Anderson said to put him in the secure room in the basement.” The shapeshifter said. Or at least, James assumed it was the shifter; their voice was now decidedly male, and he really wanted to crack his working eye to see who they were now. “We’re supposed to disarm him.”
But he kept still, and let them search him. “Good lord, why does he have all this extra ammo? Why’s he in armor? I thought he was FBI?”
”I don’t know!” The words were punctuated with one of his magazines being pulled from a belt pouch and thrown across the parking lot. “Just-! Just… help me get him inside, okay?”
”…Okay…”
James felt Zhu twitch against his skin as the two of them felt the directions they were moved through the building. Both of them building a different style of mental map for how to get back to whatever door they used when the time came. James was pretty sure that he knew vaguely where this was, or at least what kind of building it was, but he didn’t dare open his eyes and potentially give the game away yet.
Hallways and corners. Two sets of stairs. Another hall, a door through an intermediate room, and then a final shorter hall before a door that he was moved into. “Stick him on the cot.” The shifter said. “I’ll… I’ll get Anderson. Can you watch him?”
”Sure. You okay?”
”No.”
The voices faded as the door closed, and a heavy ratcheting clack announced the lock being thrown. Sitting up and letting Zhu slit a talon through the zip tie on his wrists and massaging the band of marked skin where they’d cut into him a little, James opened his eye to see the cell he’d been put in. A plain beige room, with a radiator on the wall and a table bolted to the floor. No decorations, not even wallpaper, and no windows of any kind either. It looked like a holding room for a mental health crisis, only somehow less comfortable.
There was something in James’ life that had, in a way, been a part of him for a very long time. He put himself in danger, he tried to protect people, save people, and he fought when he needed to. And it had become… almost normal to him. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t how people were normally, it maybe wasn’t how people were supposed to be. But it was how he was.
He was a paladin. He found dangerous situations, and he handled them. Not just that, he wrung advantages out of them, so he could do it again better next time. To him, that was one of the core parts of his role; he existed to convert power into good in a way that brought more of that power to his hands. Letting his enemies bring him here was a risk, and admittedly, he might not be thinking clearly, but he had a plan, and this bullshit had gone on for long enough. There were only so many times someone got to try to kill him or his friends before they’d gone too far.
James had survived more things than he should have, and he had learned from every failure and fuckup. He’d filled the gaps in his life with self improvement in a dozen ways, and he’d made the practice of being hard to kill or shut down into a career.
This cell wasn’t going to be his end. If for no other reason than that paladins - at least so far - seemed to attract dramatic rescues like it was a compulsion upon fate itself. But James had higher hopes than just waiting for Anesh to come bail him out. His tactical opponents had decided to capture him for some reason, either to trade for their own wounded, or to interrogate him, or even just to finish him off somewhere else at their leisure. He didn’t know. But the process of capturing someone when you were a secretive cabal and not, like, the government or something, meant that you needed a place to put them.
A memory of a tactical briefing Camille had given them came to his mind. That being captured on purpose was a good way to expose operational sites from a poorly managed group. A well managed group would have intentional separation for this kind of thing, but people who weren’t career criminals might not even think of it. James certainly hadn’t; he’d sort of assumed if they ever did take prisoners they’d put them in the Lair somewhere, and Cam had just… stared at him. For three minutes. Then the briefing had ended when she’d walked out the back loading dock, dropped off the scraped concrete ledge that had survived oh so many semi trucks backing into it, and strode away into the strip of trees that separated their property from the adjacent building.
That part wasn’t important.
What was important was that James was pretty sure the people who had two overlapping and partially competing operations happening within their ranks, who didn’t know half their members were from one of the two dungeons that they only explored half of, might not have good operational security.
So what he needed to determine was how his escape route synergies with an assault plan. And then realize that plan, and get the others here to help him mop up.
”Zhu, did you manage to text anyone before they stole my phone?”
”I… didn’t even think of that. I don’t even know if I can push a touchscreen. I’m really sorry.”
”It’s fine.” James breathed in, holding air in his lungs tightly enough that his chest ached. “You ready?”
The navigator pulled himself all the way into reality over the bits of James’ armor that hadn’t been stripped off in the car. Three eyes down his right arm, a layer of dusty orange feathers that led to a split limb with a long taloned hand that had a pair of blue orbs floating in it, a thick feathered tail with a fanned base, and more feathers across James’ shoulders and neck. Zhu had grown more and more sturdy over time, even through the dungeon disease that still plagued him. “I am very ready.” He announced. “Are you? You look like shit. I’m glad I don’t do the eye overlap thing in my form that Path and Dan do, that would suuuuck right now.”
James snorted as he pulled some gauze out of a pouch they’d left open but hadn’t emptied. “That’s… Dan? Really?”
”We shorten Pathfinder’s name, why can’t I shorten Daniel’s name?” Zhu shot back.
Rubbing at his temple, James took a few sharp breaths, and then plucked the bullet out of where it had started to stick into its spot with dried blood. It hurt like hell, and he let out a keening whine of pain at the action he maybe should have waited on. Shoving the gauze against the hole in his face, he got Zhu to hold a flat bandage in place so he could wrap medical tape around his head, only getting a few dozen of his long hairs stuck in it as he made himself a makeshift eyepatch. “Okay.” He gasped out. “I can banter now. I’m good. You don’t get to decide on names cause you’re bad at names.”
”What?! My name is great!” Zhu’s voice was clearly trying to be playful even as he was concerned about James’ injury.
”Zhu you don’t even know how first and last names work.” James retorted, pulling the stress ball and Library figurine out and holding one in each hand as he rose to his feet, and made sure he could stand without wobbling. He could. So he nodded. “And yes. I’m ready.”
”Me too. Let’s do it.” Zhu said seriously. “They’re never going to expect this.”
James almost smiled. His version of being a paladin was, perhaps, not the safest one. But he hoped that by the end of the night, he could show some results.
_____
Alex had never been to college in her before life. She’d sort of wanted to, but also sort of didn’t, but also never actually made a decision on the matter. When she’d been working for the call center that had turned out to be sitting on top of a dungeon that would happily trade orbs for human lives, Alex had been lying to both her parents and herself that she was saving up so she wouldn’t have to rely just on scholarships and student loans.
Since joining the Order properly, she’d learned a lot of stuff without setting foot on campus, but she’d also learned that orbs weren’t everything. And that had led to her auditing a couple classes at the local community college; one for creative writing and one for media analysis. That second one she’d taken with James’ dog. Or… with Auberdeen. It felt weird to call the dog “James’ dog” when Auberdeen was smart enough to turn in the essay assignments.
Either way, Alex had now experienced going to classes and navigating odd academia construction choices. Which hadn’t come close to preparing her for The University of Tulsa.
The college was spread across a picturesque chunk of land that wasn’t directly in the middle of Tulsa, but was within walking distance of a Taco Bell, which felt like a bizarre contrast with the red brick buildings and expansive grass of the quad. Alex had also realized shortly after she’d crystallized that thought from her study of maps of the area that she seemed to think of spaces in terms of what fast food was nearby, and that was kinda weird.
She wasn’t going to stop doing it though.
Alex was here because, while she didn’t know what kind of paladin she wanted to be or even what a paladin was actually supposed to do, James had told her to go solve problems. And this place was experiencing a string of disappearances that, almost as soon as Alex had gotten here, she’d learned weren’t disappearances at all.
The thing about the modern world was, people assumed that you didn’t have privacy. That everything was recorded, that things were instantly noticed, that there was no way to miss anything. And yet the reality, Alex had found, was almost the opposite. Oh, there were a ton of ways to see every individual aspect of your life. Show up late to work and your boss would know. Take a trip and your GPS would see every sudden stop you made. Go to the hospital and your doctor would have every part of that on file. But none of those people or systems would see the whole picture. None of them would see the car crash.
Alex didn’t see the whole picture either, yet. But she had collected a lot of pieces. The fact that people were being murdered was obvious once you knew that more than one person had been murdered. Murdered, too, not disappeared. It only looked like disappearances to people who just accepted that someone had stopped showing up.
The pattern of it was less clear, though the murder part was easy. Student records were helpful for beginning, though it took a bribe and no small amount of flirting to get the ones she wanted. Dorm access was easier, because people would just open doors for you if you asked sometimes. Professors and TA’s were willing to talk when Alex presented her FBI badge - technically a real one too, since she was a consultant, even if the Order hadn’t heard from Malcom McHarn in a while - and they helped fill in more personal gaps.
Traffic and security cameras were easy at this point, the Order’s emerald penetration software working as intended to get access. Police records, she would have had a harder time, but she didn’t bother; everything she actually needed was covered by the other information and the public website that kept a running list of incidents picked up on their police scanner, which Alex matched to each vanished girl.
Direct witnesses were the most time consuming part of the investigation. Friends were almost non-existent for the victims, which was itself a big clue. Family often didn’t know they were even missing, if they cared. Roommates were only aware that someone had dropped out. Honestly, Alex had gotten lucky when she’d met the homeless man who had seen one of the students shortly before her death, and had been willing to tell her what he knew for twenty bucks.
Twenty bucks seemed light for helping catch what was shaping up to be a serial killer. So Alex had taken him to breakfast, talked for a while in what had been actually pleasant socialization that he seemed to hunger for more than the food, and bought enough time for someone from Recovery to be ready in Townton to receive him and get him set up with a place to stay for as long as he wanted it.
All things put together gave Alex a picture. And she fucking knew it wasn’t a complete one. But it was the picture she had, and now she could start rotating that image and finding the rest of it. Like a magic eye puzzle, only murder-y.
Alex hated that she’d had that thought. It felt too flippant in the face of actual deaths. She’d spent too long around James, she was learning the wrong lessons about banter and it was screwing with her head.
The picture, though, was this: Someone, for some reason, was killing students at this university. Only students, unless they used a different profile of killing off campus, but that seemed needlessly complex. The people they targeted were, universally, neurodivergent and queer women, which hit a little close to home. It also felt wrong. Like it was too intentionally obvious. But maybe her quarry was just that stupid? Alex wouldn’t bank on it though. The killer also, for an unknown reason, did the murders with a sword. Which tied into something Alex had found the edges of.
She was pretty sure the killer was a delver.
And that might be a problem. But that was literally her job as a paladin. And she was a delver too; hopefully a more dangerous one than her target. Which was why she felt if not confident then at least prepared as she trailed after a potential victim.
This wasn’t the first person Alex had stalked in the dead of night, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. The killer wasn’t on a schedule, and the school was big enough that there were hundreds of people who fit his target profile. But Alex didn’t have any solid leads, and so she’d switched tracks to creating a network of contacts.
Like Sapphire, who was halfway to the nearest Taco Bell, and currently on a call with Alex as she stalked the other girl. “This feels silly and stupid all at once. Are you sure you’re a professional?” The college student asked Alex.
”First off, don’t talk to me, you’ll give it away if anyone is paying attention.” Alex replied, trying not to laugh. “Also I’m totally not a professional. I just… uh…” She trailed off. What was she, even? Paladin didn’t really feel like a career path, right now. Even though she’d wanted it and been terrified of how real it felt in equal measure. Now she felt like she was starting to flounder.
Maybe whatever magic James had woven around them just hadn’t caught on her like with the others. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to be here.
”Uh, A-Alex?” Sapphire’s voice took on a sudden note of fear that made Alex snap to attention. “There’s a guy ahead of me.”
”A guy?” Alex didn’t start running, but she did accelerate her walk, her authority and for some reason her Timing helping her fall into a brisk pace that would take her around the corner from the parallel street she was walking and directly to her contact and maybe friend. “Describe him. Don’t get close!”
Sapphire’s voice shook. “But he’s ahead of me? Should I run? He just appeared under a streetlight.”
That sounded bad. Alex’s heart rate sped up, and she started running. “Yeah, run.” She sent silently through her skulljack. “I’m almost there. Don’t risk it.”
Alex took a corner, greave keeping her from stumbling on the concrete as she grabbed a streetlamp and whipped herself around. The roads here sucked, as they did in every city she’d been in so far, and she should have allowed for the extra distance; it was something like five or six hundred feet from where she’d come out on the main road to where Sapphire was standing. She started sprinting, her authority feeding extra oomph to her legs as she bolted forward, unwilling to take any chances with the life of one of the girls who was helping her.
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She could see Sapphire up ahead, unrecognizable through the gloom of night and the washed out orange of the streetlights, and she could see the man that was standing on her other side. Which was wrong, Alex’s spatial reasoning told her; that meant he’d already circled around her.
Through the phone connection, Sapphire shouted at the man to stay away from her, which was followed by a laugh and spoken words that Alex couldn’t quite make out. Then, ahead of her, the air broke.
It looked like broken glass scattered through the air at chest height. Maybe it sloped, Alex couldn’t tell, but it seemed to wrap around her friend and the man that she mentally tagged as her target. It also didn’t disconnect the call, so she could hear Sapphire yelling for him to get away and leave her alone, and also the clatter of metal on the sidewalk.
Alex didn’t slow down.
She’d spent a lot of this trip thinking about what it meant to be a paladin. Which was, ultimately, a waste of her thoughts. She knew what it was; it was what she was already doing, and she was just mincing words trying to make herself feel like she ‘should’ do something specific. But the truth was honestly pretty simple. Someone was in trouble, and she was running toward them.
”This is gonna suuuuuck!” Alex grit her teeth as she slammed through the broken air, authority toughening her skin as they both expected it to shred her. But instead, there was almost no resistance, and Alex skidded forward from her little hop, seeing Sapphire pressed against the far edge of the effect like she was trapped here, one overly fancy rapier on the ground in front of her and another in the hand of the man about to skewer her. Alex flipped the mental switch that told her greave to strike, and her forward momentum was suddenly a dash that put her by the assailant in a blink, her foot angled down as the leveler greave brought her whole leg up in the perfectly sketched kick to land a blow on the man’s knee.
He staggered forward, sword missing Sapphire as he spun on Alex. “Oh! A second?” He smiled, and she hated that the smile looked downright pleasant on his face. Alex preferred it when assholes looked like assholes, not like they were cute enough to get people’s numbers at cafes. The mask obscured most of his face, but not the eyes, and not the grin.
There was a pause, like he was waiting for something. And when it went on long enough, the broken air around them shifted, and his smile got wider.
”Drop the sword, and I won’t aim for your dick.” Alex commanded, flicking out a weighted collapsible baton in one hand and pointing at him with the other. She tried to project confidence, but inside, she was worried. The greave kick hit really, really hard. Break bones hard. And she’d landed it on his knee, too, but he was still standing.
”Now now, don’t be crass.” The murderer laughed. And then he lunged.
Alex wasn’t ready for it. Not even close. The man blurred and was in front of her, point of his sword going for her throat. Her shield bracer, set to sword when she’d kicked through into the circle of broken air, activated and stopped the strike, but if it hadn’t, then Alex was almost certain she wouldn’t have had time to cast anything or dodge before she’d be dead.
Holy shit. He was trying to kill her.
Fear cracked, then buckled, and gave way to an incandescent rage. He was trying to kill her. Again, someone was trying to murder her, and Alex knew for a fucking fact that it wouldn’t be a very impressive reason. She retaliated by whipping her arm toward him, authority-enhanced strength sending her baton toward his head, which he dodged with contemptuous ease. What he didn’t dodge as well was her firing off a Melt Cloth blue orb, plastering the mask around his mouth and leaving him blurring backward to make space so he could claw it off his face.
Alex had no interest in letting him do that. She was already engaging another greave kick to close the gap and mixing it with a strike. But he blocked the baton and dodged the martial arts and she was starting to feel a sinking feeling about this one.
Not like he was toying with her, exactly. Though he was laughing now, the handsome features of his face streaked with solidifying fabric goop looking like he was having the time of his life. But he was just way too fast for her to actually hit. He took two more strikes against the edges of her shield before she could even react, and Alex started to worry. She had a finite number of charges, and if she couldn’t end the fight, then she’d be in trouble when she ran out.
The murderer laughed as Alex tried to hit him again, but that was mostly a secondary attack while she dumped a Survival Flare into his sword. It would heat quickly, and become unusable, but right now he didn’t seem to either notice or care, and she wasn’t sure how long it would take to work. Not to mention she couldn’t keep using Climb spells in a fight like this. She wasn’t really good at planning mid fight, and all she knew right now was that this wasn’t going the way she wanted it to, and she needed to get Sapphire and get out. Which she could do.
Maneuvering around a scarred wooden power pole, Alex turned and bolted for her friend, who was punching against the apparently solid air. Abandoning her baton with a clatter to the street to pull her telepad out, she winced as the shield flickered around her from a strike to her back, and the mental readout that she’d gotten in the habit of having up at all times told that she had one left. And eight minutes before the next recovery.
She reached out to grab Sapphire, which was when the murderer must have realized she had some kind of escape plan, and shifted to stabbing at her friend. He blurred across the sidewalk and bit of road, ending up beside the girl in a second. And Alex, knowing that a normal human couldn’t take a hit from a magically enhanced murderer, used another of her plentiful greave charges to kick her way between the two of them at a speed that wasn’t quite as fast as her enemy but still got her there in time.
The sword bounced off the shield. And then his fist hit her in the jaw, hard enough that it would have shattered her face if not for her purple orbs. “Oh, so it’s just the sword then? Fascinating! I’d love to swap notes sometime!” He laughed as he dropped his sword, the metal leaving heat lines in the cooling air now. “Does it work on this one?” He kicked the rapier he’d thrown on the ground for Sapphire to ‘use’, and assumed a fencing pose. “Maybe we won’t have time for notes after all.”
Alex, hand reaching behind her and grasping for Sapphire’s hand, faced him down with a cocky grin. “Try it and find out.” She said with a shrug, not wanting to let on that she was now entirely out of shield charges.
”I think I will!” He laughed. “It’s a shame to kill you. No one else has had any fun so far.” The murderer sounded disappointed, but still lunged forward again in sloppy but still too-fast form, just as Sapphire’s hand slapped into Alex’s, and she tore the telepad with her teeth.
The blade was an inch into her chin and starting to slice sideways when she vanished.
And as Alex and Sapphire landed back in the dorm room, the two of them both screamed. Pain that wasn’t pain wracked her body, something she couldn’t quite name pulling itself out of her muscles, her blood, her bones, her self. Lines of sparking lightning ripping out of her and pulling back before vanishing.
Then it was over. And Alex gasped for breath, blood dripping onto the little area rug that covered the polished stone floor of the room. She tried to push herself up, but stumbled. She wasn’t… right. She wasn’t moving right.
She tried again, and started to figure out why she wasn’t moving right. It didn’t take her long to figure it out. She was slower than she should be.
“S-shit.” Alex’s cough was the first word spoken as she helped Sapphire up. “Second. Not a second person. A second in a duel. And we lost when we ran. Did he say anything to you?” She asked, and instantly regretted it, as her helper was currently sobbing and struggling to make her hands work properly.
Alex pulled herself to her feet. Her friend came first. And after that, she was going to have to figure out how to stop someone who was not only faster than her, but had just stolen some of her ability.
Because there was no way she was going to let this go. And she’d need a real actual plan to pull it off.
But she was a paladin. And she wasn’t done until she was dead. Maybe not even then! Maybe ghosts were real! Alex was optimistic, even now, in the face of this.
She helped Sapphire over to the bed, even as she started compiling a report for the Order, just in case she needed serious help. But she already had some ideas; once the fight was over, and the adrenaline and pain was gone, Alex was actually really good at planning. And now, she was pretty sure, she knew enough to skewer her opposition.
He’d stolen her speed. She was going to steal his smile.
____
There were a lot of nice restaurants around the legislature building in Montevideo, Simon was finding.
At first, it made sense. The people who worked here were politicians, and discussions and deals over lunch was a time honored tradition. But during his time in the city, he’d had multiple occasions to get lunch around his hotel, which was pretty far away from the government building, and it turned out, Montevideo just… had a lot of good restaurants everywhere. A little less variety than back home, but not by much, and it was lightly amusing to him that there was a single aspect that crossed all cultural boundaries.
There was no way to know from looking at a place how good it was. The fancy outdoor pavilion with the garden sculptures and the overpriced drinks was exactly as likely to be the best thing you’d ever tasted as the restaurant under an overpass where you ate at camp tables and the kitchen was built in what used to be a public bathroom.
Simon loved it, but he was also aware that he loved it because his old companion would have loved it. Still did love it, through him, really. James - the James that had died - was into the experience of chaotic life like this. Into the way that sometimes even terrible experiences were still fun. And Simon, inheritor of what remained of his soul, now was into that too.
One of his two leveler earrings drained charges as he walked through the restaurant toward the person he wanted to meet. This place was nice. Back home it would be so far outside his ability to afford it that he never would have set foot inside, but here, the economy was a little more flattened, so things were generally more affordable even if the upper end was lower. That was, in Simon’s professional communist opinion, generally good.
The clink of silverware on plates, the chatter mostly in Spanish, the pleasant atmosphere of white stone and gold decorations, the fashion styles that were familiar but different than home, it made the restaurant seem like another world to him. Briefly, Simon wondered if this was how camracondas felt. He’d have to ask Spire next time he saw her; he didn’t have a camraconda in his errancy team, but the two paladins had plans to meet up later in the month if they didn’t decide they were ready to go back.
Simon sat down at a table that was occupied by three other people and flanked by a pair of standing bodyguards. “Good afternoon.” He said with a smile, keeping an eye on how the earring power that let him avoid hostile notice was slowly ticking down on uses.
One of the two men at the table, with voluminous blonde hair and a flat face, looked at him in confusion. “Excuse me. Where did you come from?” He asked, glancing at his bodyguards.
”Outside.” Simon said. “Though you mean how did I get here? Magic.” He smiled, hoping that he’d improved his smiling game enough. The way he smiled had always been a little… angry looking.
”Did you bribe someone to be let in?” The other man asked. He was older though probably still in his forties, with thinning hair and narrow eyes, a few scars on his chubby face to go with an equal number of laugh lines. “Are we being threatened? By a foreigner no less! Oh, it’s been a quick minute since that’s happened!” He seemed almost pleased by the situation as he cut a strip off his steak and took a grinning bite.
Simon liked him immediately. It was hard not to; he’d gotten into a habit of liking a certain style of person in the Order, and that style tended to be the kind of people the Order jumped at the chance to hire. “Well, it’s not a threat.” He said, speaking a little slowly so his magically learned Spanish could come across clearly. A couple skill ranks and a processed .mem only went so far. “I honestly just couldn’t get ahold of your office.”
The president of Uruguay sighed. “You aren’t the first foreigner to find me at lunch to ask for a ‘favor’, and I doubt you’ll be the last.” He said, seeming to rapidly lose interest in Simon, turning back to his meal and the open folder he was reading from on his side.
The woman at the table, dressed in a folded tan garment that Simon didn’t come close to knowing the name of, spoke up. “Yes Get on with it. We do have jobs to do.”
“Ah, thank you.” Simon took a glass of water from a waiter who had no trouble seeing through his earrings, and sipped at the cool liquid. “Sorry, to be clear, I am here for you, Ms. Bouvier, not anyone else. No offense, mister president, but I didn’t actually think you were the right person to talk to.”
There was a pause as all three of the politicians looked at Simon. Their lunch set aside as they appraised him.
Ms. Bouvier spoke slowly, perhaps matching his own incomplete grasp of the language out of politeness. “Why is my office difficult to get ahold of? I’m a busy woman but you should be able to leave a message.”
”Magic, probably.” Simon sighed. “Also if I say that, they hang up on me on the phone.”
The older man chuckled around the fork in his mouth, pulling it out with a flourish to point Simon’s way and speaking as he chewed. “You cannot actually-“
“You are the man responsible for my daughter’s life.” The president said suddenly, leaning forward as he realized something important.
Simon winced. “…Yes. But I’d rather not bring that up.”
“Luis?” The woman asked softly. “What are you talking about?”
”Three days ago, someone broke into the hospice care ward at St. Marta’s.” The man said slowly, voice low as he stared at Simon with sharp eyes. Looking for something, almost predatory. “The incident was almost not reported, but I keep an eye on the hospital. You might know why.”
Simon nodded as he sipped from his water again. The man who was pointing a fork at him lowered it. “Your daughter?” He asked his fellow politician. “Was there-“
”As of this morning, almost half of the ward is empty, and the staff are continuing checkups on the rest.” The president said. “They weren’t prepared for so many people to survive.”
There was a laugh from a nearby table, a swell of voices and noise. Simon lost another earring change, and drank half his water to try to buy some conversation space. Then he sighed. “Do you know what you get when you save someone?” A pause. He took another sip before setting the glass down, though he kept his hand wrapped around it for the cool sensation. “People think it’s a thankless job, but it’s not. You get too much. Save a life, and more often than not, people will think they owe you. Not just the people you saved either.” He extended a finger off the glass to point at the president. “Me, my team, my people, we’re not interested in extorting you for a favor. That’s not how we work. Gratitude is one thing, but this isn’t a personal meeting for fun. This is about something important, and I want it to be evaluated for what it is, and not for what you think you owe me.”
“And what is this meeting, that you wanted to start with my office?” Ms. Bouvier asked. “Mister wizard. With your mysterious ways that has the president’s bodyguards not looking at you? And, I assume, the reason that our defense minister has been texting us about foreign agents in Montevideo.”
“Well… I wanted to ask about large scale immigration.” Simon said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck and fidgeting with the skulljack clip. “Your country is… quite pleasant. Not totally perfect, but after being here even for a little bit, it feels like you’re the only adults in the room when it comes to being a nation. And I, personally, am interested in making sure that a group of disenfranchised people have a place to call home. A real home. The kind of home that can be a world to them, and not just a temporary sanctuary.”
“And you are coming to me directly, during a lunch you should not have been let into, because…?” She stared at him with alert and intelligent eyes, brushing a hand through the air to sideline whatever her colleague was going to sy.
Simon smiled slightly. “Because they aren’t human.” He said simply, pressing through the sudden vibe of contemptuous disbelief. “And because I don’t just want you to let them into the country. I want you to lead your people in accepting them.”
“Assuming I believe you-“
The president cleared his throat. “I would believe him, Chell. I… will tell you why after lunch.” He looked around the restaurant; the climate down here was such that the president could dine out in public without it being a spectacle, but saying state secrets out loud was never smart. There were at least a few people here who weren’t having a nice day out, but were hoping for a piece of information from him or his ministers. Reporters, mostly.
The information clearly shook the woman, but she recovered herself, channeling her confusion into a demand of Simon “… why?” She asked.
He shrugged. “Because they deserve it. Our goal, our long term goal, is to do a lot of what you’re doing, but everywhere. Democracy, dignity, freedom, happiness, these are our priorities. But right now, we’ve got refugee groups that we’re going to run out of the ability to support on our own. And you are both small enough to be open to a rapid change, while also large enough to stand on the world stage and announce your support in a meaningful way.”
“How inhuman?”
“Chell, you cannot be taking this-“ The man who had looked almost playful before now looked more like the kind of person who had earned his scars, and was frowning unhappily at Simon as he addressed his colleague.
“How inhuman.” She reiterated.
Simon held back another shrug. “Uh… differing levels? There’s a few species.” He ignored the sigh and the comment about how of course there was more than one. “The most problematic might be the camracondas, in terms of physical compatibility with social life. They’re basically just big snakes though. Ratroaches are a lot more concerning to human standards, because they’re… rodent and bug parts slapped together, basically. Infomorphs are just not even physical objects if they don’t want to be, and they’re probably the most worrying in a lot of ways. Definitely not human in how they look.”
“Not dogs then?” The president commented quietly. Quietly enough that Simon knew he wasn’t expecting to be heard. More of a mutter under his breath and the noise of the restaurant. “That’s reassuring and worrying.”
”So you explained why you chose here. But why them?” The minister asked, not hearing her dining companion.
”I did explain. Because they deserve it. Because they were… slaves. Artificial creations made to be soldiers, or victims, or both. They deserve a chance to live like people. And they are people, no matter how different they look, and I believe your country is the kind of place that can accept that.” He smiled sadly. “A place to start. Start to help them heal, and start to build a better tomorrow.”
The woman sat back, looking at Simon with a critical eye. But as he spoke, her gaze softened. Something in what he said seemed to reach her. She was responsible for quite a few things, and her office often had to say no to ideas that she would have preferred not to. But that didn’t make her a monster, and it didn’t make her cruel. In fact, she prided herself on her fairness without the cruelty, a pairing that didn’t exist as many in her field justified themselves.
So when she spoke next, it surprised the two men at the table. “On behalf of the government and people of Uruguay, I would be interested in hearing your proposal.” She said.
”Chell, you cannot-“
”Oh, hush.” She chided the man. “I don’t tell you how to do business, you don’t tell me how to manage population.”
”You tell me how to do business daily!” He reminded her. “This is insane!”
”This is, if it is real, something important.” She said, standing from her chair as Simon lost another earring charge. “An opportunity. And I have every intent of taking it. Now, would you be so kind as to escort me to my office? We can have a discussion somewhere more private.”
”Ma’am, I’d be happy to.” Simon said, genuinely not expecting the level of immediate interest.
It was a day where no one seemed to get what they were expecting. Least of all Ms. Bouvier, who was somewhat shocked to learn teleportation was an option. But it certainly beat taking a cab.
_____
How big had Ophiem been?
Spire-Cast-Behind wondered about it in a very active camraconda way. In an alert pose at the edge of the slowly faltering human settlement, staring out past the obstructions toward the flat dry grassland that covered everything except the road stretching out of sight. She rolled the thought over in her mind. This place had been, if not economically viable, then at least popular enough for some people to settle down. Have families. Live and grow and eventually die here.
The idea of living for thirty years felt ancient to her. Akin to the sensation of the time she was enticed to a swim in the ocean and she acutely felt the uncaring abyss open up underneath her body when the sand was out of view. The fact that humans lived to be a hundred years if they weren’t killed or lacked medical care was, frankly, stupid. That was too long.
But maybe she’d make it there one day herself. Maybe she could do that. Spire didn’t know how long she wanted to live, but she did feel like every day she was interested in seeing tomorrow, and that didn’t seem like it would ever stop. Maybe a hundred wasn’t so bad.
Ophiem had lasted more than a hundred years, but only on a technicality. What was left had replaced the original buildings, and it had itself degraded over time. With nothing to replace these structures, they slowly accrued maintenance needs that weren't met, damage that wasn’t fixed. Until eventually they’d be demolished or just abandoned in the wind.
And she didn’t really, honestly, know if that was because of simple human economic forces, or because of something like her.
”Hey dude.” Tyrone, one of her companions on this long trip, stepped up beside her at the edge of town, taking a short drink of coffee from the thermos he carried. “Riho called. Says the state records are wrong but she can’t prove it.”
Spire hissed in frustration.
”I wonder.” She said, staring out at the sunset, asking herself if tonight was the night that more creatures of smoke and solidified orange light would reveal themselves. If tonight was when the written statistics would skew farther from reality. “How many people were there?”
”No way to tell.” Tyrone was, normally, boisterous to the point of being irritating, constantly excited, and possessed of a lot of very dumb opinions about dungeon life that he enjoyed sharing. So it worried Spire-Cast-Behind immensely that he was currently being serious, tapping the thermos on his leg as one hand rearranged parts of the ongoing explosion of hair on his head. “But hey, at least we know it wasn’t too big, right?” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Spire gave a bobbing nod anyway. The city of Ophiem had, if not a clear border, at least an obvious area it occupied beyond which nothing had ever been built, except the nearby military base, which was even more abandoned than the town.
But it still didn’t feel right. It felt like she was missing something.
”Authority.” Spire said calmly. She didn’t need to speak, but it felt good to focus what she needed through her digital words. “Prioritize protecting me from mental attacks.”
”I’ve gotta get one of those.” Tyrone laughed. “They’re like infomorph dogs, right? I could totally manage an infomorph dog.”
The camraconda flexed her mechanical arms, doing a quick motion check as she made sure all her gear was at hand. “You could not.” She said, hissing a small note of amusement. “You approach responsibility and leadership in the way that James says he does. You would kill an authority faster than Momo kills houseplants.”
”Didn’t Momo make Tyranadonny? She seems like she’s doing fine, so it can’t be that bad.” Tyrone tried to lighten the mood.
”Tyranadonny is the natural end result of several dozen failures to grow basil, I think.” Spire-Cast-Behind turned, letting herself look away from the empty plain around the edge of town.
A few hundred feet away, the nearest template-built ranch home sat with the lights off. In the broad and cracked street in front of it, a young man tried to pretend he wasn’t eagerly waiting for her. Karl was pretending he was playing soccer with an invisible opponent, occasionally bouncing the ball he had off the curb and juggling it for a few taps before letting it drop again. She envied him his dexterity and his limbs, though not his place in this city.
Spire-Cast-Behind felt more than ever like this place was going through a quiet apocalypse. But now, now that she knew that there was other dungeon life around, she wondered. How much was because of things like her?
Was she the end of the world?
The Order knew it was coming, but it was all wrapped up in cryptic warnings and vague non-promises. And she asked herself if, maybe, she was a part of what was feared. The end not of life, but of normalcy. The end of the ability of normal humans to ignore the smoke creatures on the edge of their territory.
Spire didn’t like to think of herself as an end of the world. Especially when she was supposed to be saving it. It didn’t feel like what a paladin was supposed to do.
As she and Tyrone moved to head back to their temporary lodging, she almost hit a mailbox. Not especially uncommon around here, but it did make her twitch in alarm, because she had excellent spatial awareness, and the mailbox certainly hadn’t been there earlier. Jerking backward, Spire heard broken glass crunch underneath her, feeling it scrape against the plate covering she was wearing.
Whipping her head around, camera eye working frantically to focus, she tried to see what was happening even as Tyrone just walked off, ignoring the debris suddenly around them and talking about they should go to the tropics next so he could teach her to surf. And teach himself to surf.
Spire ignored him as she focused on the pile of flattened rubble that she’d been sitting in. It sat at the end of one of the town’s few roads, under the same thin sunlit grey clouds as all the others. But she would have sworn on her life that she had been sitting in… not the grass, not on the open plain, but somewhere that wasn’t this.
”Yo dude! You coming?” Tyrone called, and Spire whipped around to face him, about to yell for him to stop and look.
Then she saw what was behind him.
On the other side of the empty and cracked pavement, there was another demolished heap. This one with a rusted pickup truck sitting in front of it, and its roof collapsed with a single wall still standing. It had been one of these ranch homes once, but now it was just a broken hole in the map, and Spire hadn’t even seen it until right now.
Until she told her authority to protect her.
”You have to get out of here.” She told Tyrone. “We all have to get out of here.”
His joking mood coasted on momentum until he realized she wasn’t kidding. “Okay. Sure, yeah. What’s up?”
Spire looked back through the broken window she’d been sitting in front of, in the collapsed and weather damaged half of a house that she’d been in the middle of. The paladin looked out over the next street, with its own sporadic line of dilapidated and partially collapsed structures. Looked to the next street, where some of the buildings weren’t copy and pasted ranch homes, but were faded brick, maybe old businesses or government buildings.
Obstructions. She’d thought they were… obstructions. She had seen them, and just looked past them, watching the endless grass beyond through the gaps between and filtering out what she was looking at.
”Something has been killing this city.” She said. “And we need to evacuate the civilians, because I do not know if it has stopped.”
“…Is it going to eat me, right now?” Tyrone asked, looking around himself, hands held out in odd little claw shapes that didn’t do anything but mostly happened because he had no idea if he was supposed to be punching something or grabbing something or just running.
Spire hissed a sigh. “No. I was being dramatic.” She paused, and hissed again sharply. “But not by much. Come. We have people to speak to.”
The camraconda paladin felt like the solution here was simple, but she knew it wouldn’t be in reality. She was too used to the fact that ‘home’ could change on a day to day basis. That sometimes you had to leave everything you knew. That monsters required fast action, or you’d pay for it.
She just hoped it wouldn’t be too difficult to make everyone understand.