“Strength does not make one capable of rule; it makes one capable of service.” -The Stormlight Archive-

_____

Getting into the building had been an experience.

James had forgotten that the company had gone back to an ‘everyone in the building’. He wasn’t entirely sure why they had done that, since according to a profanity-laden email exchange with Theo, everyone had loved working from home and actual results were way up for everything except manufacturing. Because for obvious reasons you couldn’t run a manufacturing line from an apartment.

But the business he’d worked for had never, in his opinion, been well run. And at this point, his opinion had an amount of weight; not only did he actually have a real business degree that he’d worked for, but he also had much more practical experience with organizational leadership. And this was… just a dumb call. All around.

And yet, it was happening, and that meant when the two vehicles full of the skeleton crew they were delving with this week pulled up into the parking lot just before one AM, they found an asphalt expanse that wasn’t as empty as James had gotten used to.

“Hm.” Alanna had said as they’d pulled up to the front, watching the others pile out of their own car and start over to the van to grab their duffel bags.

“Fuck.” James had editorialized a bit, realizing that there were still going to be people working in the twenty-four-seven call center.

He could practically feel Arrush tensing up in the back seat.

“Hey.” El said with a casual shrug. “I’ll hang out with you if you wanna wait in the car. It’s like, what, a half hour, our time?”

“I mean the door doesn’t open for a little, but something like that.” Alanna said. “But are you sure…”

Arrush cautiously tapped El on the shoulder. “No.” The ratroach rasped out.

“No?”

“No.” He said again, nodding toward the building. “I will… live.”

James raised his eyebrows a little, but mostly covered up surprise with a smile. He was about to say something, when there was a hammering on the back door of the van, and everyone in the vehicle except Alanna jumped. “Oy! Open up!” Momo’s voice came from outside.

“God dammit Momo.” James and El burst out at the same time. But it was halfhearted anger, at best, and El smirked at him as they moved to pile out of their van and get moving.

It was cold out. Really cold, compared to the inside of the van with four people and a working heater. Two days to Christmas and December had decided that it was time to really buckle down and give a proper showing. A light, omnipresent layer of rain made the near freezing temperature feel that much worse, and the biting wind really drove the point home. None of them wanted to waste time, and Momo’s rush to get them out of the van with their gear suddenly made more sense.

Collectively, they grabbed their bags, trooped up the steps to the front, and funneled single file past their friendly security guard and into the lobby.

Up an elevator in two batches of four, out onto a floor that was all at once familiar and alien. A place that James had once known, had been at so often he’d grown a kind of bored contempt for it. Even when the dungeon stuff had started. But now that he wasn’t supposed to actually be here, and there were humans in the building to catch him, there was a feeling of knowing where all the halls led, but being low-level unwelcome in them.

Then they had to backtrack once, because the company had remodeled part of the building and one of the halls did not lead where James assumed.

Then they spent around forty five minutes haunting the break room, waiting patiently for the window in which the Officium Mundi door was accessible.

There weren’t actually that many people here at this hour. Maybe three or four actual employees. But it was a bit of a fun moment when one of them walked into the break room, bought something from the vending machine, suddenly realized how many people were in here, caught sight of Arrush, and just kind of uttered a puzzled ‘uh…’ that trailed off to nothing before they almost sheepishly backed out of the room.

“It’s normalization by context.” James explained as they counted down the last seconds to the door. “Seven of us sitting around with one outlier? Anyone who sees that is going to have to question if either they’re hallucinating something, or if this is just okay.”

Arrush nodded, but still didn’t get it.

“I kinda want to use this dungeon as an example.” Alanna said. “But this is probably gonna be sorta normal for you? But check this out anyway.” She stepped forward first, and pushed open the door to another world.

Grey, tan, and beige went to war over which color would dominate the landscape, and came out with a three way tie.

Hard packed carpet, the kind that was technically not stone but still made feet ache if you walked on it, spread out from them in a flat sheet of unremarkable flooring. But then the ground became remarkable as it went on for forty feet. Eight. Two hundred. Stretching not just into a wide area, but into a landscape.

Cubicle walls rose up, first in neat rows they you wouldn’t be able to tell apart from a regular Earth office, then into twists and turns of a maze of halls and desks. And then, further on, into towering pieces of twisted architecture that looked half geometric, half organic.

In the far distance, the horizon sloped upward. Cubicles and things pretending to be cubicles dotting the far off landscape like it was a cityscape viewed from a hill. No one had been able to verify if the dungeon kept sloping, kept wrapping itself around until it was a whole ringworld, or if the horizon effect was just a strange quirk of how viewing over distance worked here. But either way, it highlighted just how massive the space was.

And before it all, jutting out of the carpet at a slightly tilted angle, lower walls half-buried in the floor, was a tower. It was obvious just from looking at the outside that it would be cramped; it was only the size of a three by three cubicle cluster, smashed together, and then stacked over and over on top of itself.

It was the only spot in this whole place that the dungeon wouldn’t shift, reclaim, or respawn things in when there wasn’t a delver watching.

And at its top, up two dozen sloped and wobbly cubicle wall ramps, was an arcane machine that could duplicate things.

Honestly, it was kind of the most magical thing here, just on a raw power level. But it wasn’t what James was here for tonight.

“Alright! Let’s get set up, and get moving!” He cheerfully strode forward. Five other people followed him, moving with a familiar efficiency.

This was the place where he felt comfortable. Not the stupid office building outside, that his Order would hopefully own soon if they could clear up their money situation. Not the mundane halls where he knew he wasn’t welcome.

No, James belonged here. Places like here. Exploring the artificial horizons.

“This place is enormous!” The high school intern they’d brought along for this trip called from where they’d stopped, jaw dropped, shortly after coming through the door. They were standing next to Arrush, who had an expression on his face that probably meant mostly the same thing, neck craned to look upward at the distant sight of the horizon.

Anesh gave a chuckle from next to James’ side. “I’ll give him five minutes to gawk, then I’m reclaiming my lab assistant.” The student was part of the Order’s plan to rotate new people in through safe dungeon exposure first, and for someone who wasn’t even eighteen, that meant that the most dangerous exploration the new kid got to do was help run the duplication ritual. “Good luck out there tonight!” He leaned in and shared a kiss with James, before slipping around his partner and landing a similar strike on Alanna.

“Have fun shattering the economy!” James called after Anesh as he and the others headed up the tower’s internal ramp, carrying a small case with a deployable orange totem and another with as much platinum as Karen had been able to purchase on short notice. Momo and Alex had tagged along today, and James was pretty sure it was so they could argue about orb metaphors without anyone in the Lair interrupting them.

Meanwhile, his crew was getting ready. El and Alanna were busy helping each other slip the increasingly personalized body armor that Order knights wore on, double checking their emergency supplies, and limbering up. And after he doubled back to nudge Arrush to come join them, James did the same, making sure to secure the well stocked medical kit in the pouch hanging from his own armor before he also got to loosening up his legs.

Compared to the rest of them, Arrush’s armor looked the most different. Not because he was a ratroach, but because they’d switched what material supplier they used for their injection mould sometime after the first Winter’s Climb delve. So all the replacement plates and segments of his heavily damaged custom fitted suit were a slightly different color, giving him a half-molted look.

He looked slightly less imposing than he would have if he wasn’t standing next to Alanna, who almost matched him in height, and El, who was balancing a knife on her palm and trying really hard to look like she wasn’t as excited as everyone else.

“Alright.” James said with a soft clap of gloved hands. “Let’s see what’s out there.”

_____

It took six minutes for them to get into a fight with a potted plant. It started trying to choke El when everyone passed by. She reacted first with wide eyed panic, and then with a determined struggle to flip her knife open and slice the vine away from her throat. El got another two good furious stabs in on the plant that she felt personally vindictive toward before James noticed she was in trouble and cut it off at the base.

It was a good start to the delve.

_____

[+2 Skill Ranks : Program Use - Microsoft Word - Formatting - Headers]

Arrush’s first skill ranks were, as was tradition, largely useless.

_____

The four of them emerged from a cramped hallway one at a time, spreading out to a semi-circle without really thinking about it. Overhead, thirty foot high spires of wall blocked out the distant ceiling lights, and small flashlights in the rigging on their armor illuminated the dark floor around them. And ahead, the floor dropped away, leaving only a few thin fuzz covered plywood squares as the bridge across a chasm.

It had been quiet so far. They’d been trying to show Arrush, and to an extent El as well, as many threats that they knew about before they were already a problem. Arrush had stayed tensed like a coiled spring the whole time, which was probably a fair reaction when they were showing him how to avoid setting off exploding coffee cups, or to identify signs of a large strider nest in the area.

In contrast, El had *relaxed* when they’d made it into the dungeon. Something both James and Alanna were silently finding funny as they pushed deeper, nudging each other and pointing out every time their companion casually grinned at something.

They were aiming deeper today, because a couple people in Research wanted to continue testing a running theory that the deeper in you went, the higher the rewards scaled, in some way. And testing that was hard with normal weekly delves where they didn’t always have a delver team that could be described as ‘good at this’.

Not that members of the Order were bad at this. But more that, if pressed to assemble a four person squad with an eye toward maximizing effectiveness, it would be very easy to do worse than the four of them. This team was either confident or self-destructive enough to willingly try the more dangerous situations.

“We aren’t actually going down there, right?” El asked, keeping a healthy distance from the edge. She was more focused on the hole than one the cracked cavern they found themselves in.

“Only a little bit!” Alanna answered, slinging her gear bag to the floor.

“Alright.” James spoke softly, everyone still on guard against making too much noise and sparking a horde. “We’re gonna go down two layers, and poke around there for a bit. Who wants to stay up and stand gu- El. Okay. Thank you for volunteering.” James gave an amused sigh at the girl waving her arm frantically. Next to her, Arrush cracked his mouth in a grin, the line of glowing blue saliva standing out sharply in the darkness. “Okay. Alanna and I will go down. Haul us up if something goes wrong.”

The knotted rope was tight in James’ hands as he followed Alanna down into the dark without much more preamble. Sliding down slowly in short bursts as they made sure nothing was going to lunge out of the cliff face and try to eat them.

About fifteen feet down, Alanna came to a stop. There was still more rope, but they weren’t gonna drop all the way down to the lower floor right now. Instead, she reached out, keeping one firm hand on the rope, and grabbed the lip of the cubicle wall nearest to her, pulling them over to the wall.

She had to half crawl through the breach. James just dropped down, the hard work already done, and landed next to her. They tied the rope off to one of the slits in the artificial cliff face, and looked in at where they’d landed.

It looked… well, normal. Dark, obviously, there was no light James could see except their flashlights. But it was just a hallway of cubicles, with a particularly low ceiling.

It reminded him of being in one of the towers. Layer upon layer, crushed against each other. They both had to stoop a little to not hit their heads on random juts of material, but Alanna had it worse than he did.

Alanna’s voice was a whisper. “How far in?”

“Let’s check the first few cubicles, before we commit to anything.” James whispered back.

Something about this place made whispering feel appropriate. With a nod, Alanna moved forward first, James following, both of them casually palming the hatchets they had with them. The shorter weapons ideal for the cramped environment.

The first cubicle was so flattened down, at a steep angle, that the only way in would be hacking apart a wall. Alanna stooped down to check inside, seeing similarly tilted furniture, a desk that had been crumpled by the ceiling above it and pushed partway through the floor. But no movement.

They moved on. The next one was better, despite the square lump of floor that jutted up just in front of its door gap, making getting in an exercise in momentary claustrophobia as James squeezed through.

It was just… a normal cubicle. He checked to make sure the desk lamp wasn’t going to detonate on him, and then started rifling through things. The filing cabinet was tilted over, and jammed shut, and probably had been for a while unless this whole area shifted frequently. Which was possible. And there wasn’t a computer to mess with. But there were still drawers, and a coat hanging over the wheeled office chair that had slid down against the far wall from the mild slope.

It stopped feeling like a normal cubicle when James checked the coat and found not just a wallet, but also an Australian passport. And then a wallet bulging with cash, and ten different licenses. Lucky, but not too weird yet. Of course, when he opened the desk drawer and found almost twenty neatly lined up bottles of high strength prescription antifungal medications, along with another tight roll of bills, he raised his eyebrows.

The stapler on the desk - mundane, not alive - was also giving off a weird vibe. James poked at it, shifting it with his hatchet a couple times to make sure it wasn’t a trap, before he reached out and grabbed it. Eventually, just to see what would happen, he depressed the mechanism down, and along with the chunk noise of a staple being deployed, felt a pulse ripple out from the stapler. And then back into his head, along with a weird vibe of where the nearest walls and obstacles were. Stapler based echolocation. Neat. He packed it into his bag.

He paused, and ducked his head down to speak to Alanna who was watching the outside. “Kind of a lot here.” He said. “Like, a lot a lot. Weirdly a lot.”

“Let’s check the next one.” She answered, and James moved to follow her onward. After grabbing the cash. Not the pills, though. He didn’t want anything rattling in his pack while he had to run away from something with too many teeth.

The next cubicle held just as much, including a small picture frame that Alanna told him she was pretty sure had a diamond mounted in it, and not the fake decorative kind.

“Why’s it so quiet here?” James asked as they moved on.

“Because no one said anything that would curse us yet.” Alanna whispered back.

They rapidly looted a few more cubicles, and moved on, until they got to an intersection. An intersection that held a vending machine that was half-collapsed through the floor underfoot, the way it was tilted blocking off forward access, but leaving the left and right paths open. They each pivoted a different direction, and James nearly screamed as something shadowy flitted away from the beam of his flashlight.

Heart hammering, he groped behind him to tap on Alanna’s arm, not wanting to look away. She wheeled around, their lights overlapping and bathing the corridor in their glow, but revealing nothing except for slanted floor and slightly crumpled walls, and a single knobby black cable snaked along the ceiling like a root.

“Nope. We’re out.” Alanna declared, steering James with a hand on his shoulder toward the exit.

He was loathe to break eye contact with the empty hall, but she was insistent, and so James turned back, planning to rush as best he could without running back to where they’d come in.

Instead, he came face to face with a puddle of matter that dropped down from the ceiling in front of him. It oozed against the floor like liquid, before snapping back to its own center, and rising up in front of James. Caught in the beam of his flashlight, it looked like a thousand rubber bands, squirming like worms, wrapped around some kind of dark dripping fluid that left a splotch on the floor where it had landed. It composed itself into something with four limbs and no body, each leg affixed the a point on the floor or a nearby wall.

And then it seemed to notice that James was staring at it. And there was a metallic ratcheting *click*.

And his flashlight went out.

“Alanna!” James yelled, at the same time he blindly swiped forward with his hatchet. A shudder ran up his arm as he felt the blade bite into something, and he yanked back, shifting his feet to deliver a kick to where he *suspected* the thing’s center mass ones, just guessing from where the hit had landed. But he didn’t connect, and his light swept back in to the space in front of him as whatever it was bounded away.

Not just away. Up. It hadn’t turned off his light, it had eaten it, and James instantly caught on and tracked it by where the light retreated slowest. It had climbed up into the ceiling, up onto one of those cable roots that punched through from the layer above.

“Where?” Alanna demanded.

“Up. Gone.” James pivoted around his partner as she swept the area he’d just been standing in, pressing his back against hers. “Go, let’s go.” He found his teeth rattling; this was the first time in a while the dungeon had actually gotten to him like this.

Alanna moved in short steps, and James followed, walking backward, doing his best to not trip her up with his own footsteps. And then, ten feet from the rope they’d tied off, his light went out again. And James made a snap choice.

“Run!” He snapped at Alanna. And without hesitation, she listened, shooting forward in three increasingly long bounds, slamming through the small entrance they’d come through and sending a chunk of cubicle wall tumbling over the edge into the chasm, and grabbing the rope on the way. She yelled something upward as she started climbing.

James didn’t hesitate, turning to follow and seeing his flashlight slide off the bubble of darkness as he turned, pushing his acceleration to the limit as he sprinted after her. Alanna was already climbing, but James realized he wouldn’t have enough room if he jumped after her. They should have used *two* ropes, he thought, cursing their own shortsightedness.

He made another snap decision, and dropped to a slide, letting his momentum carry him over the edge, and just past the very bottom end of the rope.

He caught it in what he’d likely pretend later was a casual move and not a terrified scramble to not fall to his death, pulling them out in a swing away from the cliff face just as the thing that had been chasing James leapt after them.

The rubber band construct seemed confused as it lost contact with any nearby points, its limbs twitching and dripping whatever black goo it was holding inside itself, before rapidly snapping back and contracting it into a rough ball. It sailed under James feet, *way* too close for comfort, before crashing against the far wall of the chasm somewhere a hundred feet below them.

“Alright fuck this place!” James called, feeling the rope start to pull upward as El and Arrush hauled them up. His hands were shaking, and he didn’t trust himself to climb after Alanna, who had already pulled herself over the edge. “Let’s come back with a flamethrower!”

“I have a flamethrower.” Arrush informed James as the ratroach helped him over the edge and settled him into a seated position with three of his arms.

“I… what?” That information was a little too abrupt and abnormal, even for this situation, and it snapped James out of his adrenaline crash with a strange sense of curiosity. “What? Seriously? How?”

Arrush carefully reached into one of his armor pockets, and pulled out a small lighter. James raised an eyebrow at him as he took three attempts to spark a flame, and then held it there between them, with James tentatively waiting for it to explode or do something weird.

Which was when El walked by, trailing the rope she was bundling up. “Ar, that’s a normal lighter. A flamethrower is that, except… uh… bigger? It’s not that.”

“Oh.” Arrush looked almost disappointed as he took his rough finger off the trigger and carefully replaced the device in his pocket. “Am… sorry.”

“You know what? Don’t be. That helped more than arson anyway.” James said, taking a deep breath and smiling at the ratroach. “Help me up. We’ve got more to do tonight, and none of it involves going down again.”

_____

[+1 Skill Rank : Athletics - Sport - Water Polo]

[+1 Skill Rank : Operation - Wire Production Machinery - HS-P-9200]

“Dammit.” Alanna grumbled as El cheered over winning their little wager. Having gotten the dumber skill, she politely stepped back with a bow, allowing the younger woman to take point for the next few halls.

_____

Four stories up a tower, with a backpack laden down with several bags of the mana enriched coffee grounds that ran the replication ritual, and a few dozen new yellow orbs, they encountered a tumblefeed.

It was sleeping, or at least, not moving. But no one felt like throwing thermite in the enclosed space, so they quietly backed away, taking what they’d gotten, and moving on.

_____

They were a half kilometer from the carpet grass when the ambush hit.

It was, by James’ standards, not even in the top five of ambushes he’d endured in his time delving. If he had the time, he would have written a professor’s note to the creatures trying to kill them to see him after class. Not that it wasn’t something that was a problem, but that he could see so many small ways it was destined to fail. A solid four out of ten.

They were moving through one of those areas of low walls, two by two pods of cubicles where you could actually see everything for a couple hundred feet. There were some taller walls coming up, but beyond that, the carpet grass fields stretched on for miles, and there was a kind of eager excitement to see what was beyond one of the farthest points they’d ever reached.

The main thing to watch out for here were the traps. It felt open, like you could see everything, but there were triplines matched to the shifting patterns of carpet that could trigger pencil darts, exploding lamps, and those stupid pencil sharpeners that billowed out coarse particulate clouds of graphite. So they were moving slowly, and keeping a very sharp eye out.

Well, James and Arrush were keeping a sharp eye out. The ratroach took to trap spotting like he’d been doing it his whole life, which was another thought that caught James off guard as being secretly very sad. But while James was showing him how to carefully sneak up on desk lamps and disarm the traps into red orbs, El and Alanna were holding back, following their lead, and having idle conversation.

“So, when are we checking on the Alchemists?” El asked.

Alanna shrugged. “No idea.” She replied. “When we hammer out an actual agreement, I guess? Might be a while.”

“Bah!” El snorted. “Just feels like it’s been a while. Also I want something to do that takes me out of the Lair.”

Alanna gave her a sympathetic look. “Your mom bothering you?”

“She’s… she’s my mom. I’m required to love her.” El stated.

“That’s not even close to true.”

“Well, I do anyway.” El shrugged. “But yes she’s also just the worst sometimes. She keeps asking when I’m gonna try to get a raise.”

“Do you want a raise?”

El thought about it. “Kinda?”

“Hey James!” Alanna called up softly, causing James to freeze and wince from where he was laid prone underneath a desk, slowly reaching up toward a lamp, Arrush keeping a close eye from around the corner of the cubicle. When there was no answer to Alanna’s call - and when Arrush hissed at her - she shrugged. “We’ll ask when he’s not busy. It should be fine.”

“Anyway, I still wanna help with shit. The Alchemist thing just seems kinda cool. And since the next Route exploration isn’t until after we sort that out, I’m spending a lot of time hiding from my mom.” El made eye contact with a stapler three rows away, perched on the edge of a wall, and gave it a politely nervous nod. The little creature staring back, before scuttling backward out of sight without any other reaction. “It’s not boring, but it feels like we’re doing nothing. Aggressively.”

“Hurry up and wait, pretty much.” Alanna gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “And yeah, I get ya. I mean, it sucks, right?”

“It does! I feel guilty just doing this, and I hate it! If I’m gonna feel guilty, I should at least do something to earn it.” El grumbled.

Alanna laughed back, trying to keep it quiet. “I mean, it’s not like we could do anything else. And this *does* help. Even if it just makes us stronger, at least we can use that when we are needed.”

“Yeah, maybe I can get another heart!” El said.

Which was when James had chosen to slide out of the cubicle and flick the red orb he’d extracted at Alanna’s head in retribution for her interrupting, causing his partner to stick her tongue out at him as she knelt to grab it and put it in a pouch. “How’s the extra heart going, anyway?” He asked El. “That seems like one of the most ‘this could have some ramifications’ purples that we’ve ever gotten.”

“Oh, I feel pretty good!” She flexed her hand a few times. “I think it’s basically just blood doping, but all the time? Which is kinda fine.”

“There’s not, like, long term problems there?” James asked.

“Shouldn’t be!” El cheerfully answered. “Not as far as I looked it up, anyway.”

“…Did you not see a doctor?” James asked slowly

El snorted. “Dude, I don’t have health insurance.”

“Yes you do! Everyone in the Order does!” James answered.

“Oh. Well, I forgot.” El looked defensive, trying to slide past them to keep moving. “Come on, let’s go find adventure or something. You like adventure, right!”

“Go to a doctor!” James and Alanna said together. Even Arrush grumbled at El, folding his arms over his chest. He didn’t know exactly why she’d done something wrong, but if everyone was concerned for her, he would be too.

Which was when he’d noticed something.

“Being… watched.” Arrush pointed out to James, and the whole group stopped making jokes in an instant, following the track of Arrush’s eyes.

There was a strider on a wall two rows over, staring at them.

James didn’t untense though when the girls did. They’d seen striders and the electrically charged computer mice that someone had started calling ‘volets’ around all day, but none of them had engaged the team. This one, though, was different somehow.

It was watching them. Not curiously, but directly. Like a predator, not just an observer.

Alanna suddenly shifted. “Oh.” She muttered. “It’s not feeling.” She said, realizing what her Empathy power was trying to tell her. This wasn’t a piece of random wildlife, this was a *dungeon monster*. A clarification that was hard to make, but that was very important for this place.

“What now? Turn back, different path?” El suggested.

“Hm.” James thought. “Look. Up ahead. Slowly. Near the floor of the cube on the right.” He gestured with a nod, trying not to draw attention to the gesture. Peeking out from the edge of the barrier, the corner of a white plastic computer case stuck out a half inch, the corners of a few cable limbs from the green orb version of a shellaxy also visible. “They’re waiting for us.” He said.

“Sooooo… *different path* then?” El suggested again.

“I mean…” Alanna looked at El with an expression of excitement.

“Mmh.” Arrush growled acknowledgement.

“Oh, come on.” El rolled her eyes. “Don’t make me the voice of reasons in this group. Please?”

James smirked, unclipping the hatchet from his side, as Alanna tightened her grip on the sledgehammer she’d brought along. “Look, it’s a perfectly normal ambush.” James said. “Ready?”

“Ready.” Alanna sounded like she was actually ready. El just sounded resigned.

Either way, when they dashed forward around the corner, and James toppled the first 2.0 that was lying in wait for them, the whole group moved together. On the other side of the hall, Alanna and Arrush swept the other cubicle, and James heard the crunch of plastic as his partner took out something similar to the writhing electronic creature he had pinned down. He raised his hatchet and brought it down as hard as he could on one of the non-curved spots of the shellaxy’s surface, trying to keep the creature rotated so that the absurdly painful lasers it had mounted in its front case couldn’t lash out at what parts of his own skin were exposed.

One hit, then another, the second one slipping off, and then a third before he had a good crack along its casing. James shifted his gloved hand, yanked back the plastic armor, and got a half-strength swing buried into the internals of the computer before its thrashing geometric cable legs dragged it away from him, almost yanking the axe out of his hand.

While he pursued, he noticed El moving past him, flinging a small form against the wall, and working with sharp kicks and throws to deal with the small cluster of striders that had poured over the wall as James had engaged the computer.

He lunged forward from his crouch, dropped a knee onto the tipped over wounded monster before it could right itself, and let his weight cause more damage. It dinged furious screaming error messages at him, setting small fires on the hard carpet with its lasers while it tried to fight back, until James hit it a few more times and it finally went silent. To solidify the kill, a green orb popped into existence, half buried inside the shattered case.

From the other cubicle, Alanna called out an all clear, and after helping a struggling El grab a strider that was trying to climb up her back and smashing the stapler into the nearest desk a few times, James did too.

El was shaking out her hand, trying to somehow banish the bruise from where a strider had tried to bite through her glove through sheer force of will, stepping back from the scattered bits of smashed chitin from the group that had been lying in wait for them, when another actual ambush hit.

James rated this ambush much higher than the first one. Mostly because it included a paper pusher, and was therefore immediately more dangerous, but also because it had waited until the group had dropped their guard in thinking the fight was over.

The paper pusher leapt over the low wall, the false arms of its suit shifted forward like it was running on all fours, followed by another of its kind. They slammed into James from where he was still crouched, sending him sprawling back into the closest wall with a hollow thunk as his head hit the thin surface. One of them had pounced on El, and was dragging her down, while the other had run out the door of the cubicle.

James coughed, trying to drag himself up as he struggled to recover from having the air knocked out of his lungs. The inhumanly blank face of the paper pusher staring down at El with a complete lack of concern as she frantically tried to stab it, rolling rapidly to avoid letting it get a grip on her. These ones were obviously of the stronger style, probably green orbs themselves, and James needed to move if he was going to help her.

But Arrush got to it before he could. The ratroach coming over the cubicle wall from next to them, springing off a desk and clearing the low barrier without consideration. He crashed into the paper pusher on top of El, at the same time that James got his feet under himself. When the stuffed shirt rotated an arm ninety degrees in its shoulder socket to snatch the wrist of Arrush’s arm that was currently holding a weapon, the ratroach didn’t hesitate, instead just widely opening his mouth and heaving a glob of glowing vomit onto the creature.

Arrush’s internal fluids were… significantly more acidic than a human’s. Against the dragon, in Winter’s Climb, he’d been able to soften up stone to the point that he could pulverize it with his fists. Against something that was technically made of paper?

The stuffed shirt went limp in seconds, corrosion eating it away, its grips on El and Arrush dropping to nothing as it slumped forward, body caving in as the dust inside it turned into a slurry.

Without hesitation, James swung around the cubicle door to where Alanna was currently in a fistfight with their other ambusher, her sledgehammer abandoned somewhere. It wasn’t facing James, and so he grabbed it by the neck, and executed the most aggressive judo throw he knew how to do. Which was absolutely not what you were supposed to do in competitive judo, but when disabling your opponent meant decapitating them, James figured being sporting about it was off the table.

“Haooo…” He stopped trying to talk, sucking in a breath, then another, before he looked around at their group. “Hokay. Any more?” He asked.

“You’re never allowed to walk us into ambushes again!” El yelled, way too loudly, from where Arrush was helping her up.

“Sssorry.” The ratroach spoke wetly, wiping at his mouth.

“Why?” El asked without thinking.

“Sssuposed to… be… learning to… fight. Better.” Arrush rasped out.

James and Alanna shared a look with each other, then glanced over at the taller kid. “Uh, no.” James said with an approving nod. “You’re supposed to be learning how to fight without breaking your own arms. How’re your arms?”

“...Fine…” Arrush admitted.

“Great. Good job.” James leaned over and patted him on the armored shell of his back. “Someone grab the orbs, let’s get out of here. I need to find a place to sit down for a while that isn’t prone to being randomly attacked.”

_____

[+2 Skill Ranks : Government - Democracy]

It was a simple shift, but the growing knowledge base and the utter confidence in its accurate nature that you could get with skill orbs was a huge help to James. It was something he’d spent a while mulling over now, and every orb like this helped push him more toward solidifying where he wanted the Order to start their governing principles off.

_____

They found a dozen small magic items, a lot of them converted to blue orbs just for portability. Not everything could change the world, and sometimes you just didn’t need a pen that automatically corrected which ‘your’ you were using.

But sometimes you found a coat that made you feel stronger when you wore it. Sometimes you found a folded birthday card on the edge of a desk that let you see how your closest loved one was doing right now. James didn’t touch that one, for romantic reasons.

Sometimes you made space for the lunchbox that felt like electrified salt, whose purpose you couldn’t determine.

They found the space in their packs that they needed, and moved on.

_____

“You know what’s nice about dungeon time?” James asked.

The four of them were sitting on top of overly sized desks that jutted out of the ground like rock outcroppings. The carpet beneath them flowed in waves, an artificial breeze from distance air conditioner units making the massive strands of grey fabric sway like wheat.

James was on one desk, laying on his stomach so he could hold himself up on the slanted wood surface with his arms, watching the grass below them. On another, flatter desk nearby, El and Alanna knelt with their legs pulled in as far as they could get them, while twenty feet away, Arrush perched on the corner of one of the pieces of furnished terrain where it stuck up into the air like a spire.

Below them, something shaped like an automated carpet cleaner left furrows in the material as it circled their position. The chrome shelled beetle-like creature having almost taken El’s leg off when it had surprised them, but unable to fly or climb, was left to simply bump into their perches until it tired of the hunt. James didn’t like these things, and not just because they seemed to primarily feed on the porcupine like lamp dogs that roamed these plains in packs.

The lamp dogs, with their quilled coats, seemed cool. He wanted to see if he could feed one of them and make friends, but these damn cleaners kept chewing through them with their low to the ground industrial grinder of a mouth.

“What’s great about dungeon time?” Alanna called back, calm in the face of a murderous and armored opponent.

The oversized roomba hummed by James’ desk, and he tightened his grip on the forty five degree angle. Not worried, just… now would be a bad time to slip. “It gives you so much time to think about things!” He said with a smile in his voice. “All this extra time to relax, and process stuff! It’s nice. I like this.”

“You like… *this*... sp…spp… specifically?” Arrush wetly hissed out, the words taking more force than he was used to in order to be heard over the distant fans. Even still, the disbelief was still there. Arrush came from a place of constant violence and constant fear, but there, the fear was of the people around you, and the violence came from them too. There was never a point when he’d found himself simply *waiting*, while something that wanted to kill him was a meter away and hoping he’d fall before it got bored.

He’d gotten bored faster than he’d expected to. Living with the Order had, perhaps, spoiled him. Softened his mind somewhat. To distract himself, Arrush had begun trying to pry open the desk drawer within his reach, and upon success, and revealed a colony of iLepedes. They’d shied back from the light, except for one, that had curiously investigated. That one was sitting on Arrush’s arm now, as he idly stroked it with his rough fingers.

“Don’t engage with him!” El choked off the drink of water she was taking, splashing a quarter of her bottle to the floor as she waved it frantically, to shout over at the ratroach. “Lua taught me this! You don’t engage with bullies!”

“I’m serious!” James said. “This is nice! Like, how often do we just use the dungeon to *sit*, you know?”

“Why would we do that?” Alanna and El said at the same time, the differences in their voices giving the words a very human echo. Alanna twisted from her seated position to try to high five El, but the other girl had zero interest in that, and instead kept her eyes on the ground.

James persisted in his attempt to kill some time. “No, but really, think about it. I mean, I get that there’s treasure and stuff here, and we’ve gotten some good stuff so far, but how nice is it to just have this extra time to let your brain chew on the Alchemist thing? They get three minutes to decide if they want to accept our terms and conditions, but we get *eight hours* to relax and process it. Or, like, how we can’t seem to ever get into the news no matter how many times we teleport in public? That’s concerning! But here, we get whole extra relaxed days to consider it! We should have been abusing this a lot more!”

“He thinks this is relaxing.” El said to Alanna in a disbelieving voice. “Your boyfriend is relaxed.”

“I think he’s paraphrasing Tremors.” Alanna said back. “The good one. The one with Kevin Bacon.” She leaned back into El, taking a deep breath. “How long do we have left here anyway?”

El checked her watch. “Hour ten. We gotta go, we can’t just sit here for a week while Zoomer down there waits to eat our feet.”

“I could… distract it.” Arrush offered in his slow voice, taking his time and deep breaths to speak to them as he looked up from the friendly iLepede.

“Absolutely not.” Alanna said. “We can just shoot it if we actually need to. Even if it’s loud, that’s still an option. But you’re not bait, stop doing that.” Alanna left out that the thing had already just shrugged off getting nailed by a sledgehammer, so shooting it *might* not actually do anything.

Arrush made a noise like he was going to apologize, when James shouted something, ruining Alanna’s point about noise. “Hey. Hey!”

They glanced over, and saw James pulling himself up on his desk so he could wave frantically with his free arm, bracing himself so he could flail around. Following what he was looking at, it became clear quickly. There was a small pack of those lamp dog things, the ones with coats of razor pointed pencils, digging their own low furrows through the tall carpet maybe a hundred feet away.

“Don’t get their attention!” El hissed at James, just barely heard over the rustling in the breeze and James’ own yelling.

“No, he’s trying to warn them off.” Alanna said suddenly. “Because… yup!” She hopped off the desk, drawing a flinch from El. “Roomba’s gone! Let’s go!”

“Run, dogs!” James yelled. Because running was about their only good option right now, just like it was for the delvers. He let go of his desk and let gravity slide him down to the floor, landing in the soft packed down carpet at the same time as Arrush. “Let’s get out of here!” He pointed back the way they came, and everyone started moving in one of the few ways that you didn’t normally get to, in *any* dungeon.

A full sprint.

The carpet tugged at their legs as they retraced their trail back out of this biome. If they hadn’t had a semi-clear path out, this would have been a terrible idea, but as it stood, it was still dangerous, but not nearly as bad as it could have been.

The carpet plains were riddled with small pitfalls, sometimes used as burrows and dens of small creatures, sometimes more like actual pit traps, lined with jagged scissor blades. Or smaller desk or table surfaces that just barely jutted out of the floor, solid tripping hazards at any speed above a careful walk. And while they could look peaceful, the tall carpet hid a lot of dangerous life that didn’t have much interest in making friends. Maul carts cut game trails through the area, and paper pushers in more animalistic form lay in wait at weird places.

The four of them had cleared a lot of threats on the way in, and while they’d ended up pinned down for a good half hour or so and ultimately decided to turn back instead of progressing deeper and just telepad warping out when they ran up against the time limit, they’d found some treasures here as well.

A briefcase that instructed them to pick up a specific form from somewhere. A laptop power cable that seemed to also act as a high capacity battery, or else was drawing power from nowhere. A dozen small dungeon programs that were stored on the USB sticks that James always brought along - one of them measured whatever you typed in, which was exactly as silly as it sounded, but James suspected there was a way to break this. A binder full of gibberish reports and forms that endlessly respawned the pages - it was no Pony Things, in terms of entertainment value, but another infinite paper source couldn’t hurt.

And most importantly, on the way out, they passed by the Decision Tree that they’d discovered out here. The monitor lizards in it, little shards of glittering LED screens in the shape of geckos, stood in neat rows upon the branches. This decision tree was a half dozen shades of grey, its branches much more orderly than the others they’d found. And it liked them. Or at least, it liked El. It wasn’t clear why, but the monitor lizards had agreed to a trade of orbs at a far, far more favorable rate with El than with anyone else.

She waved to it as they passed, with as much of a cheerful laugh as a person could muster when they were doing their best to clear the zone of a hungry mechanized beast.

Which was, James realized as he found himself laughing along, surprisingly a lot.

_____

[+1 Skill Rank : Medical - Physical Therapy - Leg]

[+1 Skill Rank : Cooking - Spice Balance]

[+1 Skill Rank : Reading Comprehension - Statistics - Sociological]

Arrush’s next few skills, as the number of staplers and post-it note masks that tried to kill them mounted up, were much more useful.

[+1 Skill Rank : Templating - Advertisement - Grocery Store - Berlin]

Mostly.

_____

They made it back, not wasting any time looting or exploring and instead just tracing a straight line over their route in, with fifteen minutes to spare. That is to say, fifteen minutes past their normal buffer of time, to make absolutely sure no one got trapped in here.

That time got eaten up faster than relatively newer delvers like El or Arrush would have expected, as they all stripped off and stowed armor, replaced gear, made notes on how many bandages and packets of burn ointment they used up, and handed off some of their loot for a last minute duplication run.

“How were things tonight?” James asked Anesh as his boyfriend hustled down to the base of the tower where everyone else was waiting with the last duplicated case.

“Good. Good! We’ve got… uh six hundred thousand dollars worth of platinum in the compressed space that Alex is carrying? So that’s cool.” Anesh said it with a kind of deep economic panic in his voice.

“Jesus what?” El choked.

Alanna glanced over at her. “Wait, did you not… get that this was why we came in tonight, mostly?”

“No!” El looked shocked. “I thought we were here for the magic and stuff!”

“Well yeah, we’re always here for the magic and stuff.” James told her. “Don’t let Alanna mislead you. But also, we had ten ounces of platinum, and an orange totem so we can break the size limit of the copy ritual. So, you know. Power of two, right? It doesn’t take that many duplications to make a truly absurd number.”

“That’s so much money!”

“El, I’m really sorry to tell you this, but you are absolutely right, and we could still use all of it in a month and still find something to do with more.” James told her. He sighed, the logistics skill ranks he’d been given doing a great job of telling him just how much of a drop in the bucket this was. “And it still might not be the most valuable thing we can copy. But we can talk about this later. Right now, Anesh?”

“Here!” Anesh cracked open the box he’d brought down. The product of the extra coffee grounds and the stack of purple orbs they’d brought back.

Because at this point, there was no way in hell they would ever use a purple orb without copying it at least once first.

They’d brought back thirty six purples, the result of saving most of their yellow orbs just in case they found a decision tree. And Anesh had rapidly labeled them, crammed all of them into one of the special cases they used to copy stuff, filled the empty space with whatever was lying around, and run off a duplicate. And now, everyone took turns to grab a few, dividing them up and making the first test of what could be their next cure for cancer in the twenty minutes before they needed to leave the dungeon.

There was only one problem, which James noticed and corrected for as soon as he did. “Here.” He said, pressing five purple orbs into one of Arrush’s paws. The ratroach took a wheezing breath and cracked his muzzle to say something, but James just shoved the orbs against his grip even tighter and stepped back. “You did the work, you get the magic! Those are the rules!” He said. “You earned it. Enjoy it.”

And then he took his own advice.

[Shell Upgraded : Bioluminescense - Dermal - +3 Lumens]

[Shell Upgraded : Elasticity - Bone - Femur - +2 degree]

[Shell Upgraded : Warts - -16/Month]

[Shell Upgraded : White Blood Cell Count - +1,400/liter]

[Shell Upgraded : Nutrient Processing - Upper Bound - Vitamin C - +44 Grams/Day]

“My quest to finally have bones no one can break continues.” James muttered to himself triumphantly. “Wait, how much vitamin C does a person need anyway?” He took the offered clipboard from his boyfriend and wrote down his results, before looking up at everyone else. “Anyone get anything good?”

“I now fall slower?” Alanna said. “Which, like, okay, cool. But do you ever feel like sometimes these just change our bodies, and sometimes they change… uh… Anesh what’s that thing that causes masses to attract to each other?”

“Gravity?” Anesh looked confused, not realizing yet that Alanna was joking.

His face turned from confused to exasperated as Alanna nodded gleefully. “Yeah! That!”

“Well, I got tolerance for sour flavors and less back pain, so I’m not gonna complain.” Anesh said, not pressing on the gravity quip. “Anyone else want to share?”

“Hey what’s proprioception?” Alex asked. “I *know* I’ve heard Deb say it, but I don’t know what it is.”

“It’s your ability to know where your body is without seeing it.” James said as he started pacing a little near the edge of where the group was standing, getting eager to get moving. “Why, did you get something that makes it stronger?”

“Kinda? I got a thing that lets me extend it to things I’m holding?”

James froze, turning along with everyone else to look at Alex. “Uh…” He said slowly. “Yeah, okay, that’s… wow, you’re gonna have to tell me how driving feels now.” He said.

El chimed in instantly. “Also don’t just tell me, give me a copy of that! That sounds awesome!”

“Anyway, anyone else got anything good? Momo? Momo’s shaking her head, Momo got something embarrassing, okay, fun. Arrush?” James paused, seeing the ratroach standing still, staring at his hand that had just held the purple orbs. It looked like he was struggling to breathe. “Arrush, you okay?”

The tall figure held up two of his hands, another one clutching at his chest, before he straightened his back, and gasped, sucking in a deep breath of air that swelled his chest, the loose hoodie he had taken to wearing straining against his body. And then, he spoke. Voice still rasping, but steady. “Accelerated lung growth. And I…” He paused and stared at his arms, triangular head cocked downward at a sharp angle to focus his mismatched eyes on his own limbs. “It took away the pain. These arms do not hurt.”

Anesh stepped closer, and quietly got Arrush to repeat what he’d been given. And it quickly became even more clear that purple orbs changed from species to species.

[Shell Upgraded : Lung Capacity - Growth - +1.2 Liters/Month]

[Shell Upgraded : Fang Regeneration - +12% Faster]

[Shell Upgraded : Nerve Control - Left Arms - +/- 117,200 Signals]

[Shell Upgraded : Taste Range - Growth - +.1 Sensation/Year]

[Shell Upgraded : Jump Height - Vertical - +3.8 Feet]

Okay. Sort of changed from species to species. That last one was typical purple orb bullshit all the way through.

Anesh and Momo instantly started a quiet conversation about testing purple orbs against different species, and wondering how far the differences would go. They’d never pushed it with the camraconda or other dungeon life that didn’t want to risk more of Officium Mundi’s notice. But here, the changes stood out as being just different enough that there was the possibility for a strange future ahead of them.

James, of course, focused on the most important part of this discovery. Giving Arrush’s antenna a friendly ruffle and getting a shake of the head from the taller ratroach, he cracked a grin. “Okay! So, you can taste stuff better now! This is very important!”

“Why?” Arrush asked instantly, all of his misaligned eyes narrowing mostly in unison.

“Oh right.” Four other people all said at the same time.

“Because,” James said, “and to be absolutely clear, you are allowed to decline this invitation, but there is one very important part of the ritual of these delves, that we haven’t gotten to yet.” His smile was infectious, for everyone except Arrush and the new kid who had no idea what was going on. “And since apparently you couldn’t taste things like us this whole time, it’ll be even more interested to see if you like pancakes.”