“We could never…!” Diaz began, then stared at his display with a pained look. “I wonder how many people said that over the last century, then found themselves doing those exact things. You’re right, Kommodor. It has to be something stronger than a rule or law that can be changed or ignored. It has to be something that no one would even imagine changing.” -Kapitan Diaz, The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword-

_____

James arrived at Karen’s office via the usual route of magical elevator that he really, really wished they had more of. Magical elevator on demand would solve so many problems. But even having found a very similar Change Doorway blue orb, the Order still didn’t have the ability to replicate the effect that had tethered the Lair to their California office.

Also they were paying rent on the California office now, which James begrudgingly admitted was something he should have expected. They couldn’t expect JP’s weird acquisitions to be free forever.

He took a moment and wondered what JP was doing right now. Probably something illegal, that was sort of how JP rolled. He was currently up in Alaska, trying to do rogue stuff and gathering intelligence about the Priority Earth group, and James would likely be joining him in a few days after he’d healed more fully and had binocular vision again. He hoped it was cold. The only reason this building was a survivable temperature right now was strong AC, thick windows, and a green orb that stabilized ambient temperatures, and James wanted to go somewhere that he could breathe without sweating. He was sure, in his heart, that right now, JP was somewhere staring at a snowbank and having exactly the opposite thought, but that was just what his friend got as a karmic reward for being kind of a bastard sometimes.

Alaska would be later though. Today, James was talking to people, and also impatiently waiting on hearing from his other two new paladins. He’d be hiding that impatience for talking to Karen though.

”Come in already, if you’re in such a rush.” Karen’s reply to his knocking on her door made it clear that he had already failed at hiding anything, but James still entered with a polite and professional dip of his head. “Ah, James. What budgetary nightmare do you bring to my solemn desk today?”

James paused, tilting his head slightly as Karen’s tone caught him off guard. She sounded… happy? He evaluated the woman sitting in front of him, feeling as always more like a fleet officer on the bridge of her battleship than an accountant, but actually looking a little different than he was used to her being. He couldn’t say exactly what had changed, but she seemed less tired somehow. Less sharp.

”I like the haircut!” James offered, going for the one physical change he could place. “Very Morticia Addams.”

”Thank you, I’m trying something different. And with the picture frame we happen to have that regrows hair, I felt more comfortable experimenting.” Karen smiled as she adjusted some of the long strands of her hair with two fingers. Actually smiled, an almost serene image cutting a path across her lips. It made her look a decade younger, and James was deeply confused by what was happening here. “And you haven’t answered my question.” She challenged him.

He nodded, distracted, before realizing what he was agreeing to and shaking his head. “Uh, no. I mean, maybe? Actually probably, yes, I’m sorry.” James switched back to a confident nod as he sat down across from Karen’s immaculately organized desk.

The accountant stared back at him, a bit of her familiar stern expression creeping onto her face as she watched James. “Well?”

”Well… I don’t know, I’m just saying I’ve probably caused a new problem.” He admitted. “I know Recovery is on top of the new chanters, so it’s not that. Uh… I hear handling the Mormon kids is going… badly? That’s kind my fault, but it’s not new at this point. I’m mostly trying to think of what new money sink disaster I’ve caused because you’re right and there probably is one somewhere.”

”Why are you in my office.” Karen’s newfound happiness let her say it with a smile, but James could feel the concealed edge in her words.

He laughed it off, mostly just glad that Karen was still Karen. “Sorry, sorry. I heard that the guy you and Barkdust hired to run our newfound conquest of global logistics would be here today and I wanted to meet him.”

”Ah. Yes, mister Inoue will be here in the next ten minutes, you have surprisingly good timing.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Or you would, if you did not have access to the schedule, and the ability to have called in advance.” Karen challenged his casual attitude about dropping in on professional meetings. “Please do so in the future.”

”Right!” James saluted crisply. “Anyway, I know all our information is public, but I’m bad at interpretation, and I wanted to ask how our budget is doing.”

”Adequate.” Karen answered. “With our copying of rare materials and a profitable sales relationship with two different companies, our linguistically ironic lack of overhead is allowing us a steady profit to fuel a wide array of mad science projects.” She glanced sideways at her computer screen as something made a ping, before looking back at James. “The financial side of the Order is that we are working at a profit, but that profit is largely sitting idle, waiting for when it is needed for a project.”

”…we have too much money?”

”I didn’t say that.” Karen pursed her lips at him.

James nodded, understanding completely that she had just said that. “So we should get more large scale projects going. What’s our actual slack look like? Could we, I dunno, hire a couple small construction companies to speed up restoration in Townton and offer free housing to people who need it? That might be-“

”Yes.”

”…just… yes?”

Karen nodded once. ”Just yes.” She confirmed. “Well within our budget.”

”…how?” James had to know.

”Our unorthodox policies, even not including the magic, have created an environment of efficiency and community investment in problem solving. Our bureaucracy is streamlined, and our costs typically experience marked decreases as we rapidly get better at solving specific problems. The only consistently high expenses are payroll, but since that’s offset by everything else I just said, and also the magic, it leads to a budget that stays lower than expected. Even if we pay well above normal wages.”

James stared at her, baffled. “You complain about how much money we spend constantly!” He blurted out.

”We haven’t spoken in some time, so I can understand you thinking that.” Karen nodded sympathetically. “While I do keep an eye on things, however, you’ll find that Clark is our chief accountant currently, so he can get experience at it. His office is in the Officium Mundi building, if you’d like to speak to him. I spend most of my time managing stipend ratings for the magic distribution within the Order now. And helping on a few other projects.”

Massaging his temple, James stared in a daze down at the carpet of her office’s floor. “I was barely gone for two weeks.” He muttered.

”Yes, and things changed. I’m sure you’ll adapt, being on this side of things for once.” Karen smiled at him again.

James held a hand up his mouth before slashing his flat fingers through the air. “Now hang on!” He challenged. “I don’t just randomly show up and change things! Usually I’m the one reacting to a change that already happened! I rescue people from bad changes!”

”James half the Order sees you as a harbinger of upheaval.” Karen told him bluntly, using a voice that he was reasonably sure she only wheeled out to be studiously disappointed in the younger generation.

”Well… that’s… only mostly my fault.” James conceded, still grinning. “I’ll set up a general vote on it, maybe shop around for a few other ideas we can put money toward. I don’t want to put us in danger of bankruptcy or anything, but if money isn’t a problem, we should be using it.”

”I tend to agree. Though I would have defaulted to investments of some kind.”

”People are an investment.” James said confidently. “Arguably more so than shipping networks.”

”Mmh.” Karen seemed like she didn’t want to argue on that point, but only because she was reading something and also counting minutes until her meeting showed up, and not because she didn’t have an opinion. “Progress on the shipping project continues apace, if you’re curious.” She told him, knowing damn well that he was. “We’re going to cause a lot of disruption, but…”

”Bah.” James realized he sounded abruptly angry as soon as the exclamation left his mouth. “I hate that term.”

Karen arched her eyebrows at him, and he noticed that unlike everyone else he’d interacted with this week, she didn’t do the thing where she flicked her eyes to his eyepatch. ”Disruption?” She asked in her neutral probing tone.

”Yeah.” Sighing and leaning back in the chair, James set the backs of his hands on the desk, fingers splayed out as he looked at his palms and tried to consider how much he should say. He didn’t want to waste Karen’s time. “It’s… I mean, I have a complex thought on this, but the short version is that it feels like it ignores how things are?”

”I believe I know what your concern is, but I would like to know that you actually do have a coherent opinion on the subject before anything else.” Karen gently pointed a pencil in his direction as she plucked the writing implement from a wire basket on her desk.

James sighed. “Disruption implies that things as they are now are either normal, or stable. And they aren’t? It’s making an assumption. And it’s a simple and insidious assumption; that the status quo isn’t disrupting, hurting, and costing. That the change is aberrant because it is doing something that hasn’t been done before.” He shrugged. “And that’s just sort of a lie.” He added.

”So you believe changes are measured inaccurately because we are measuring against a balance of zero, when that isn’t the case?” Karen prompted.

Narrowing his good eye suspiciously, James gave a slow nod as he sat forward in his chair. “Yes…” He said, feeling like he was being listened to more closely than usual. “And that is just straight up not how the world works. There’s an often unknown amount of harm being done by any given system, and changing things very likely will hurt people who rely on that system in a measurable and noticeable way. But usually those systems preference those people. A change might help far more people who were deprived before, or it might ‘cost’ something financial while preventing damage that is more direct or harmful.” He was building up momentum now, and carefully picking his words even as he worked to explain his thought process. “If we were starting from ‘everything is fine’, starting from actual real zero, then any damage we did would be inexcusable. But if some people lose their jobs because we reshape how the world works into something more effective… I mean, I still feel for those people. And we talked about this before; we can probably just cover their expenses with our own profits and still be rich.” James shrugged, feeling like he’d faltered. “I don’t have a great solution there, because I don’t want to hurt anyone personally. But on a grand scale…”

”We are not beginning from a zero.” A man’s voice from behind him made him turn, though James kept himself from jumping out of his skin. “Hello, good afternoon.” He said in politely professional English as he stepped into Karen’s office.

Karen said something in Japanese that James didn’t understand beyond ‘hello’, standing from behind her desk to introduce him as he stood from his chair too and offered a handshake. “James, this is Inoue-San, our current operations director. Inoue-San, this is James Lyle, our…” Karen paused, actually faltering with her mouth open. “James is responsible for…”

”Jesus this is grim.” James laughed lightly, noticing only a slight facial quirk from the professional Japanese man he’d just shaken hands with. “I act as a free floating problem solver, and I’m responsible for emergency decisions and in some cases security.” James said.

”Ah. You are, perhaps, a modern form of a samurai.” Inoue said it with a tightly controlled smile, testing the waters with a joke perhaps.

James’ own brightening smile was filled with amusement. “Very close to that, yes!” He agreed. “No sword though. I consistently fail to be the one with the sword.” James shook his head a little too fast, wincing in pain as his eye spiked a bit of agony through his skull. He kept himself from hissing out at least, and instead focused on the conversation. “How much of my rambling did you overhear?”

”Most.” The man replied. “You are not incorrect. The global shipping industry makes trillions of dollars, and to do that, they employ millions of people across the world. It connects us with trade, and has created a way of life where fewer and fewer things are locked to a geographical region. We could call that all ‘good’, and say that our efforts, which will undoubtedly impact how many people work those jobs, would be ‘bad’. But that industry also produces three percent of our global emissions, and an unknowable amount of pollutants and toxins. It advantages nations with more buying power, allowing imperial interests to exploit people who lack the power to resist. It is devastating to ecosystems, especially oceanic ones, and not a year has passed without a major spill causing an environmental and health hazard.” He spoke quickly, proficiently, and summed up James’ own concerns in a rapid yet clear explanation that left James feeling jealous that he didn’t have that information just ready to go at any given time.

”I’ll admit, I’m surprised you understand.” James said honestly, adding a small shrugging motion for no real reason. “But yeah. We’ll disrupt things. And that’s okay, because things are always being disrupted. We shouldn’t aim for stability or infinite growth, we should aim for turning large problems into smaller, more manageable problems.”

The two men nodded at each other, the older professional seeing something he found familiar in the younger man with an obscure title and an abundance of passion, and the paladin seeing something worthy of respect in the businessman. Karen, meanwhile, used the pencil in her hand to check something off on a small pad of paper she was holding.

”What was that?” James asked.

”We’ve finished that step of the conversation.” Karen said, using words that were technically an answer and yet explaining nothing. “Now. We have three sites currently being worked on, and I need to go over a wide array of technical details with Inoue-San. If either of you have any questions for each other, now is the time. Oh, Inoue-San, if you ever have a direct issue that requires an immediate decision, James is one of the people you can contact.”

Their operations director whom they’d given a budget of large scale teleporters to nodded as he looked at the person who could solve problems for him, only mildly wondering if the eyepatch was a new choice on James’ part. “I have concerns about information leaks, especially in light of how easy it was to learn the true nature of the logisticors myself.” He said flatly, wondering if exposing what he knew would lead to being silenced and having his body thrown into the ocean. “Also I would like to preemptively know our stance on labor unions within the employed laborers.”

“We’re effectively acting as an employee owned business, which is basically a union that doesn’t have an internal antagonist. Though we should make that both clear, and codified for people joining.” James said easily. “Also yeah, I kinda figured that deception wouldn’t work long term on anyone working closely on this project.” He huffed out a breath. “I dunno, I’m not used to being a conspiracy! Karen, do you have any suggestions on that?”

”My suggestion is that we speak with our experts.” She told him. “As soon as any of them are in the building again.” Was the muttered addition to that sentence.

”I’ll be meeting JP in a couple days, I can bother him about it. Or… wait, isn’t Ben required by protocol to be around? There’s always someone senior on hand, talk to Ben.” He brightened up suddenly. “Inoue-San, have you met Ben? Because I would really love to be there when you do.”

“James please keep your antics out of my business meetings. I will speak with Ben later, for now, Inoue-San and I need to go over the details of our up front construction costs.”

James took that as his cue to leave. “Alright. Pleasure to meet you. And Karen’s not kidding, call me if anything comes up, okay?” He offered the man his business card, neatly printed from nowhere by the enchanted shirt that James didn’t usually wear but did keep in his closet, just for fun. “I’ll leave you to it. And Karen, thanks for the updates!” He gave her the best smile he could, and considered saying something about how he was glad that she seemed like she was doing better, but that seemed like it would be awkward in front of someone who was still a little bit an outsider.

Shutting her office door behind him, James was in a good mood as he walked down the hall back toward the elevator. The space was occupied today, full of people working on the organization that kept the Order working and not floundering. Though not working too hard; a mixed group of people stood chatting quietly around the vending machine, and as James passed he saw that Smoke was showing off what looked like pictures of baby chanters from Townton to them on her phone. It was a quiet and simple moment, but one that made him feel quietly happy about the world they were making here.

Before he made it to the elevator, Cathy caught his attention over the quiet sounds of the office at work, and he meandered over to her receptionist desk to find Rufus and another new strider hanging out on the flat surface. Possibly a third stapler too, but that one might be an inanimate piece of office equipment. “Hey buddy.” James greeted Rufus before nodding to Cathy. “What’cha need, and is it super dangerous?”

”Incredibly so.” She gave him a forlorn sigh in reply. “Can you give these two a ride downstairs? There’s a telepad group about to leave for the school, and you’re going that way.”

”Oh, sure!” James set his arm down and let Rufus scurry up onto his shoulder, followed slowly by his new friend who looked a lot more unsure about riding on a human. The other stapler was smaller than Rufus was, which wasn’t hard since Rufus was now definitely closing in on ‘small dog’ sizing, and had a green hull with slit eyes on either side. And whoever they were, they were also skittish, like they weren’t sure if James was going to eat them at any moment. “Got some kind of thing going on there?”

Rufus unfolded the little keyboard on his flank and tapped one of his legs on a couple keys, using emoji to convey information in direct circumvention of the bullshit imposed disability that kept him from speaking or typing easily. It didn’t take James long to put together what was being said, either.

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“Teacher’s meeting? Neat.” A few more buttons from Rufus invited James along with them, though James wasn’t sure he understood what he was being asked to help with. “I’ve got some time, sure. Might need someone on site to give me instructions. I’d love to see the place though, I haven’t gotten to participate much in the remodel, and I know you’ve been working on it a lot.”

The little red and black stapler gave James an eager bobbing nod, nearly taking James’ ear off as he bounced on his friend’s shoulder. He had been working hard at this. Researching, planning, struggling at taking part in conversations and organization, and sometimes even helping with the construction directly where it turned out striders were perfect for running cable through walls or fitting into vents.

Though often times, the HVAC work required the touch of someone with hands. Which, James would learn soon, was why he’d been invited. Well, that, and also to see how the remodeled and expanded old processing center had turned into a place that could hopefully be a wonderful place of learning for the next generations.

But also to crawl through a vent.

Because Rufus wasn’t going to do that. He had a teacher’s meeting.

_____

After dropping Rufus off at a gathering of humans that looked like they were the kind of people who would need to rapidly get used to having a corgi sized stapler in their meetings, James ended up press ganged into work with the crew doing renovations on the building.

The Order had a lot of people in it, in a lot of varied positions. And thanks to skill orbs and .mem files that could transfer expertise better and better with every upgrade they made to the process, a lot of people could work on a construction team. But work like this, large scale work on a big building that needed changes and additions that were up to code? That took outside help.

So they’d contracted. And paid well for it, to get it done fast and properly. After all, they wanted to be ready to go in a month when school started up again.

It was a tight deadline, but they weren’t building from scratch. Just making some changes and edits to the structure, the largest of which were already done. It was just down to the details now, which the Order was working out with their own labor and skill. Things like getting the kitchens in order, finalizing hiring and logistics, stocking the equipment rooms, and making sure the auditorium sound system was wired properly.

That last bit was what James was doing actually. He wasn’t a sound engineer - yet - but apparently someone had talked and it was known that he had skill ranks in electrical wiring. Not that he minded the openness; there was a job that needed doing and he could do it, so he would. That was the world James wanted to live in, and he’d be an asshole if he expected other people to do what he didn’t want to.

Besides, their normal Order electrician, Mark, was taking a day off. Which seemed fair; his kid had soccer practice, and he’d been working his ass off as much as anyone else to get this place ready. So James was happy to get on the extremely tall ladder they had and finish setting up the cabling in the ceiling of the auditorium.

Fear of heights was one of those things James knew he had academically, but he never really felt it, because he didn’t stick his head over the edge of cliffs. Which was unfortunate because he really, really needed to not screw up while he was messing with electricity. Electrical wiring actually had a level of tolerance for fuckups that might surprise a lot of people; James was aware of a story where someone’s house had been grounded completely wrong, and while they’d had to replace lightbulbs way too often, nothing had actually exploded or burned down. There was a reason that every electrician opened work on a new site by looking around and saying “I don’t know who did all this, but they were a fucking idiot” after all.

But this place was supposed to be their best foot forward. And James would prefer if he didn’t accidentally screw something up and cause the whole room to electrify as soon as someone plugged a microphone in. And being twenty feet off the ground was making it hard for him to focus on doing that.

So he focused as hard as he could on pulling information out of his skill ranks. The yellow orbs, some of them from a while back, enchanting his knowledge of current and wire, fuses and junctions. Not just his multiple ranks in ‘being an electrician’, but also a handful of single ranks in repair for various things that all sort of added up to new perspectives and intersections of ideas. Knowing how to fix an auditorium speaker led quite neatly into knowing how to make sure one was set up properly in the first place. And set up to last at that.

It helped that James had an assistant for this; the other strider that had come along with Rufus had seemed even more intimidated by the room full of teachers, administrators, and student counselors than he happened to be by James and a handful of increasingly gruff construction workers. And aside from a brief moment of terror at one of those people doing construction being a camraconda, the strider had stuck close to James and mostly just been incredibly useful at literally running cable across the rafters.

”How about…” James mused as he capped off the end of a wire that was more future proofing than anything else, “…Bethel?”

The strider shook its whole body at James, thick sharpie-style pen legs holding it upside down on a hoop of paperclips that were tethered to the ladder and the building’s metal framework for safety. The fact that a fall would be just as dangerous for them as for James didn’t seem to stop the stapler spider at all from chilling in defiance of gravity while helping the human finish everything up. The attempt to find them a name was ongoing, which was a nice way of saying that James was bad at names.

”Look I’m bad at names!” James threw out the excuse. “Hortense? No? Also these two need to go thirty feet that way. Don’t attach them to anything, there should be a zip tie you can tuck them into.” He passed a couple wires over and watched them vanish as his more adept assistant scurried away. “I can’t wait for the next push up the Climb, I’m getting fucking wings.” James mumbled.

Wrapping up the work shortly after, somehow without falling or doing anything dramatically stupid, James went to check in at what was more or less the command center for the remodel. Later, it would be a cafeteria, but right now it was dominated by a series of checklists that were steadily and inexorably shrinking.

And also people, but the checklists were the important part.

”Yo.” James greeted the guy he’d gotten the assignment from a couple hours ago. “Meredith and I are done getting the audio hooked up, and nothing is on fire. Also I didn’t have to say the electrician thing, so that’s good!”

”Meredith?” The lean man covered in bristly salt and pepper hair on both his head and his face gave James and his strider friend a small smirk. In response, the strider that was riding on James’ shoulder started trying to slap him in the face with some of their legs.

”Okay okay no not really!” James laughed, holding up a hand to avoid accidentally losing his other eye. “My mental list of names is stuck in the 1950’s or something, but the job is done. Mark’ll probably want to check it later, so I left the ladder in there.”

And then there wasn’t really time for James to do anything before he had something else going on that day. But he had a little while before anyone was telepading back to the Lair, and he was trying to conserve the physics-defying method of transportation. The Order made roughly eighty thousand total teleports with each copier run they did, and they did at least one a week, which meant there was a lot of telepads available. But also taking it for granted seemed lame to James. Like he’d be ignoring the coolest part of his day.

Also lingering let him wander the building. Wander the school, that even with the smell of fresh paint and all the tarps on the walls and construction gear in semi-organized piles, was still a place both familiar and new to James. He left Jaque - the strider seemed less annoyed by that name so maybe it’d stick - with the main crew, and went for a little walk just to have some time to himself.

Mostly to himself. He texted Anesh a picture of one of the classrooms with a ‘math teacher? Eh?’ message attached, and also texted Arrush a reply to their slowly ongoing conversation about board games. Arrush was new to texting, and did so at a languid pace, which meant that throughout the day James would sometimes get small messages from his newest boyfriend that made him smile in how mundane and comfortable they were.

But aside from that, he had time to take in the soon to be school.

Classrooms, gymnasiums, the auditorium and cafeteria, computer labs and shop classes, teachers lounges and back offices, and a library that would embarrass the local government. There was a vision that James had of the perfect place of learning, a kind of cathedral to knowledge. And they weren’t there. Not even close. This was an almost entirely mundane structure, with only a few very strictly curated green orb effects bolstering it and nothing else. But this place wasn’t meant to be like the Lair. Not yet.

It was meant to be for everyone. It was meant to be a transition to a new form of normal, for new generations.

The extensive remodel had set up the hallways to be open and with plenty of space, with alcoves and benches all over the place for students to make use of. Lockers were in classrooms to prevent wasting time running across the building for books and making students haul pointless weight. And the place was built with clear windows, open lines of sight, and blatant defiance of the architecture of school shootings.

This wouldn’t be somewhere that people went to be afraid. James refused that idea outright.

Maybe their way of doing things would work. Maybe it wouldn’t. There was a lot of research on how humans learned, and the Order could apply that with their excessive resources because eating a financial loss was okay for them. But either way, whether this panned out as expected or not, they weren’t going to half-ass their starting investment. If it failed it wouldn’t be because they didn’t give it their all.

One of the classrooms that James passed was actually occupied; a collective meeting of the school’s incoming staff. Most of the teachers were human, because most camracondas or ratroaches hadn’t even existed long enough to make it through a masters degree yet. But the room was still mixed, as multiple species were all going to be working here, especially in TA positions to get that hands on experience.

James paused at the window and watched for a bit, making note of how some of the people were new new. Humans who were here for their first day of actually experiencing the Order, who maybe hadn’t fully had it sink in that magic was real and some of their coworkers and students wouldn’t be human themselves. It was interesting to see the new teachers, all of them vetted for good cultural fit for this first attempt, mentally pressuring themselves to become comfortable with the nonhumans sitting next to them.

Or in the case of Rufus, leading the meeting. James had known Rufus was interested in this project, but this was… weird. Weird to actually see in person. Rufus wasn’t interested, Rufus was in the thick of it. Here he was, with no connection to the world beyond his place in the Order, barely any interactions with humanity, standing among people twenty times his size that he could barely communicate with, and he was still getting his point across about arranging adaptive lesson plans.

James lingered for a bit, getting noticed by a few of the people in the room and giving a reassuring smile to those that didn’t know him. Enough of them knew him personally that him being a random guy lurking outside what was technically the building’s first actually class session didn’t cause any problems.

He knew about what they were currently covering, but it was nice to see how solid their plan was for handling multiple different species with different potential maturity levels. The school wasn’t going to be split based on age; that didn’t work in human only school already, and there was enough research to back that up that they had a framework to start from. They’d be starting with four divisions of relative maturity, with the earliest being those that needed a foundational education in math and literacy, and the last being those who needed to learn how to learn and take initiative.

No hard lines between ages, just an evaluation every half year for if a student should be moved. It was the kind of thing that would take a lot of work, and a lot of attention, but everything worth doing seemed to have that requirement anyway.

James mused as he started walking again, checking out the empty echo of the school’s back stairwell that he knew there would be a group of friends sneaking into to eat lunch in the future. Up onto the second story of the building, prowling the spaces between what would someday be science classes and group art projects. Throughout all of this, the Order would be watching and keeping track in as many ways as they could, essentially turning all of this into one big research experiment. Because they needed to learn too. They needed to know how ratroaches grew up, how camracondas learned, how stuff animals became socialized, and how chanters matured. They needed to know everything. And what better place to learn than a school.

_____

”Jim.” James said as he entered one of the basement labs, nodding at the round man with a head of short tufts of brown hair. “Bill. Other Jim.” He offered the same nod to the other guest who was playing the short and skinny roles in the local cast of Jims, and the world’s most awkward secret handshake-slash-fist-bump to the man who was with the Order. “I’m here, what’s exploding today?”

The bigger man cleared his throat. ”Oh, call me Benson. Uh…”

”You’re a bit late.” The smaller Jim said like he was suspicious of James’ schedule.

Or maybe it was suspicious because James’ head was smoking like he’d recently been on fire. James decided it was probably that one. “Nik tricked me into testing one of the new potions. It’s not dangerous, it just causes hair to emit a thin not-actually-wood smoke. And I’ve got a lot of hair. Smells nice at least!” James coughed a little more roughly than he’d meant to, and hoped no one would breathe in his fumes until the potion duration ended in a few minutes.

The more professional Jim sighed. “I had hoped that the organization of literal wizards would be less chaotic than this.” He said.

”Hah. No.” James replied without much humor. “Chaos is sort of a key part of how we operate. Anyway. Bill says you guys need a decision that I’ve been appointed for?”

Bill nodded, cracking his knuckles as he moved to the head of one of the tables that there was some kind of half-exposed machinery on. The heavyset man looked almost nervous as he picked at the hairs on the back of his hands. When he spoke, it was with a deep breath and the intonation of someone who had planned out a speech. “Right. Yeah. So. The history of humanity generating electricity has been an arms race to find increasingly stupid ways to boil water.”

James raised his hand, interrupting almost immediately. “What about wind or tidal power? Or solar? Isn’t that photovoltaic or something?”

”That’s the planet generating electricity. Or sometimes the sun.” One of the Jims informed him. “We just pick some of it up. To use the least technically correct explanation possible.”

Bill sighed, dropping his rehearsed speech. “That didn’t take long to get derailed.” He complained.

”Sorry. Continue please!” James put his hand back down.

”…fine. This is a small scale model for a new thermoelectric generator. Advances in materials, as well as the obvious advantage provided by disobeying the guidelines of physics, have let us get a frankly absurd rate of production compared to what’s commonly on the market.”

”Guidelines.” James said dryly.

With a loud snort, Benson cut him off before he could ask questions. “You can create perpetual motion machines and you think that’s the least interesting spell you have. They’re guidelines.”

”Touche. Sorry Bill, go on.”

Rolling with the distractions at this point, Bill moved over to the other table and directed James’ attention to a blueprint. “Right. Yeah. So this is our facility design, which is planned out to create several large scale TEGs, with secondary turbines for harnessing pressure shifts as the heat attempts to equalize before being televected. We’re estimating…” He saw James had his hand up again. “Yeah?”

”Televected?”

”Like convected, but-“

”But remotely, okay, yeah, that’s… that makes sense. Okay, good word. Sorry again.”

Bill let out an unhappy humming. “Stop apologizing if you’re gonna keep doing it.” He told the paladin. “So at full scale, this power plant will require fairly regular maintenance, an on-site crew including casters for emergencies, and cost about twenty million dollars a year for salaries, parts, and taxes.”

”Yikes.”

”No.” Jim cut in. “No, not yikes.”

”Not yikes?” James felt like twenty million a year was a yikes. The Order only barely had that much income from their rare material sales, which was kind of why they were subsidizing the whole operation with an actual power company in the first place. Outsourcing as a way of offloading costs but still getting the social benefits. Twenty million was an earth shattering amount of money. Twenty million would let James get his phone shot in half every day for the rest of his life and not even see a dip in his bank account. Having it dismissed as far as costs went felt weird, even if he did know that large scale businesses just sort of worked with money at that level. “Why not yikes?” He asked.

Moving up to the side of the table and adjusting the blueprint against Bill’s attempt to hold it up for James, Benson gave an answer. “The plant would produce, on the low end, 6,000 megawatts. This structure, just this structure, with this magic you guys have, would power the state of Oregon. All of it. It would cost less than a tenth what is currently spent, though obviously there needs to be a lot of work still done to keep power lines and substations operational.”

”Which is our job anyway.” Jim added. He stuck his hands in his pockets, suit jacket draped off him like a professional model as he cocked his elbows and let James scrutinize him for a moment. Then he added what they needed James to sign off on. “We want to build three of them. To start. We’ll foot the bill for construction. As long as you can provide the magi, and our current agreement on profit margins stands, we’ll handle everything. Just give us the go ahead.”

“…well that’s… terrifying.” James heard himself saying. This was, very abruptly, something that was a larger scale than how he’d actually imagined this working. In all honesty, he hadn’t really believed that they’d do more than end up making some novelty generators to power the Lair and maybe Townton. “How much do you plan to make on this? Money wise, I mean.”

As Benson started to talk, Jim held up a hand and man went silent. It made it pretty clear that one of them was the other’s superior in their company. Jim spoke evenly, but there was something in his voice that James couldn’t quite place. ”Well, as per our original contract, we’d be cutting costs. So we’d have less income than we do now. But with zero emissions, almost no overhead, massive government subsidies and contracts, and the ability to rapidly expand into neighboring markets? Even just having the costs slashed would let us charge half as much and make four times the profit. And then, when you rule the world, we’ll be in your good graces.”

The last part of his sentence caught James off guard, and genuinely amused him. He laughed.

And no one else in the room did.

Jim just kept watching him, calculating though not cold or hostile. Like when he said ‘we want you to remember us when you take over’, what he meant was…

That he expected that was true.

For a moment, James let the room sit in silence as he considered something. Thermodynamic Tunnel was a fairly niche spell from the Climb that had been discovered in a battered and degraded spellbook. It wasn’t that useful for delving or self defense, and in fact, it was kind of a tiny thing in the greater array of stuff the Order of Endless Rooms had access to.

A small thing. One single small thing, a spell the dungeon probably didn’t even consider that useful or impressive. But paired with modern technology, and modern expert knowledge, it was a solution to one of the biggest problems humanity had.

All it took was a bunch of experts with specialized knowledge, and a global web of production and resource extraction, so that they could build specialized buildings with specialized tools, that could suck the energy out of heat differences in the air. And if you had that, then you had everything.

Which sounded a bit stupid, except… except they did have that. They had that right now, a prototype sitting here in the room, and the engineering workforce waiting to put it into action.

Countries, including the one that James begrudgingly called home, had proven themselves willing to go to war for strategic reserves of oil, just because of how useful a constant source of power in that form was. Millions of civilians had died for something very similar to what James and the Order planned to give away. It was a source of almost impossibly massive political and social and financial power, and right now, it felt like a twisted curse waiting for the right moment to kill them all.

“Not as tyrants, but as citizens.” James said softly.

“Pardon?” Jim asked him.

“We want to make life wonderful for everyone because we are part of everyone.” James said, looking up from the prototype and blinking his eye slowly as he made his decision. “We are going to rule the world, maybe, actually.”

”…I know.” Jim didn’t seem at all afraid of that future, though his colleague looked a little nervous. Like he might be implicating himself in a criminal conspiracy somehow. James should have him read the operations manual section on how they weren’t a conspiracy.

”We’re going to have more powerful stuff than just this. And we’re going to share that too.” James said, suddenly smiling placidly. “Do it. Start with three, then we can work on expanding. Orange totems maybe?”

Bill made a noise like he was suddenly at risk of organ loss. “For this? Fucking absolutely not. Reed would kill all of us.”

”Touche.” James said again, before checking an ongoing Order vote through his skulljack, seeing overwhelming approval, and giving the room a quick nod. “Alright. Yes. Get to work, and let me know if there’s any problems.”

He walked out of the basement feeling like his day was only half over, and he had already given the status quo of Earth all the middle fingers he had available today.

Maybe he could get another delve in, and find an orb or a spell that would give him an extra one.