“If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now” -Baz Luhrmann, Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)-

_____

‘’Good evening everyone.”

James once again stood on a stage at the back of what was, basically, a converted warehouse space. Though this time, there’d been some more time to plan, and some more effort put into setting up the seating in a way that was useful.

They also had cameras this time, too. Actual studio quality cameras, being used to record and also stream the meeting to anyone who didn’t want to be in a crowded room today.

The room was also less crowded than last time. The lack of a potential lethal conflict, and of any sort of pressing emergency, reduced turnout somewhat. Possibly because there were just fewer people in the building; a lot of the newer members of the Order actually did have homes and families, and even a portion of the camracondas had started to find places to be outside of this one building. Which was nice. James appreciated it. And there were just some people with jobs to do, which James *also* appreciated.

Also there were just a bunch of people in Townton. There was still more work to be done there. The possessions of the survivors had long since been recovered and returned, but there was a lot of city to look over, and human constructions had a habit of catching fire if left unmaintained for too long. Cleanup of the damage would take more than just a few people, but the people down there were making a start where the Order could expand into when they were ready to start really putting their magic to the test.

The end result was that the fifty or so people who had arrived to take part as the audience for this discussion got much more comfortable seating. And this time, the pipeline of suggestions had been streamlined. Instead of spending half their meeting checking their laptops or phones, the representatives on the stage were making full use of the Order’s population of interns to filter and pass on relevant information and immediately useful ideas from the audience.

Hopefully it would work out. They hadn’t tried it yet, but James was optimistic. He had no idea what this would look like on a larger scale, but for them, right now, it was a good way to keep everyone involved.

The crowd today was different, James realized. Not just different in composition, though he did notice that at least one or two of the potion people were here, and he could have sworn he’d seen Keeka lurking around somewhere, the ratroach staying separate from everyone else even as he was in a crowded room . But more, that it was different faces. Humans and camracondas that he didn’t know, hadn’t met. Oh, he *recognized* them. He knew that several of these were people who had joined Response or Recovery under the umbrella of ‘a job’. He knew some of the camracondas were the ones who took a long time to break out of their fear and aversion to people, or they were the new ones they’d been stealing away from the Office.

But it didn’t change the fact that mixed in with people like Morgan and Alex who he’d talked to, worked with, fought with, and considered friends, there were a lot of new faces. All looking at him.

He felt a smile flicker over his face. This could be something that sparked anxiety. But instead, he decided he was pretty happy with how the Order was going. New people was exactly what they wanted. And public speaking was the *one thing* that had never scared him.

“Alright, for anyone new or who needs a refresher, the four of us…” he turned and looked at the people on stage, counting. “…Seven of us are going to be discussing our strategy for the next few months. If anyone in the audience has a question or comment, either put it in the relevant part of our server, and we’ll address it when appropriate or at the end, or, if you don’t have a phone or laptop on you, signal one of the interns and they’ll come get it from you.” He motioned to the small group of volunteers, one of whom waved cheerfully.

James couldn’t help but give a full smile at the enthusiasm. “Alright. We’ve got a few things on the agenda for today, so let’s get started, and then everyone can go run free, unshackled from the need to think or talk about our problems before we make poor choices on how to solve them.”

“You were absolutely not supposed to say that part out loud.” Sarah told him as he settled into the chair next to her.

“Hush.” James said, grin still in place, looking around at the others on the stage.

Sarah was here, obviously. She wasn’t representing a particular division of the Order; instead she was simply one of the people who a lot of people had asked to be here. Functionally, she was filling the literal role of a representative.

On the other side of her from James, Texture-Of-Barkdust sat as the primary representative of Recovery, the camraconda coiled in the basket seat in such a way as so her brain could be wired into the laptop in front of her comfortably for maximum efficiency.

Past her was Marcus, for Response. The young man who had originally been recruited just to be a dispatch operator having stuck around, and gotten good recognition from a lot of people for his calm spirit, was now here as something like one of Harvey’s lieutenants. Marcus was also a good example of one of their noncombatants; the kid had no interest in fighting, or dungeon delving. He wanted to work where he’d be useful *now*. James respected that, and so did a lot of other people. James also respected the constantly growing tableau of pride flag pins on Marcus’ jacket. It was comforting.

Next was Reed, making a rare appearance from the Research basement. Though that was a little uncharitable; he actually spent a lot of time all over the place. The Order had a few empty lots in the middle of nowhere now where they tested orange orbs or - apparently - space elevators, and Reed did a lot of work on both of those. He also did work looking into statistical modeling of dungeon effects, identifying magic items, and generally keeping an eye on and leading the rest of the Research department.

Reed was currently surrounded by Planner, the infomorph being the other nonhuman person on stage. An octet of tentacled limbs with a ghostly green surface that somehow still seemed rubbery, markings like sketched notes trailing down them. Planner was here to provide legal and logistical insight, and also the unique position of the infomorph side of living that any of their long term plans might impact.

And JP, for the first time at one of these meetings in his actual role as head of their rogue division. James still did consider JP his friend, even if the two of them hadn’t actually had a chance to hang out in what felt like forever.

“First thing’s first.” JP started them off. “The Alchemists.”

“Yes.” Reed nodded. “What are we doing with the potions?”

“I… no, dude, that’s not…” JP gave Reed a sideways look, before giving a small shake of his head. “We need to talk about what we’re doing with the surviving members.”

James cut in. James was here for a lot of reasons. One of them was to sort of guide the meeting, but the other was to make sure that stuff stayed aligned with their long term ethical goals. This seemed like a good time to do that. “We’ve been over this.” He told JP. “There aren’t foolproof options, but this is an actual chance to put some ideas into action.”

“I can think of *one* foolproof option.” JP opined.

“Man, don’t do that.” James’ mirth was gone now, replaced by a quiet sadness. “The threat they represented is gone now. They get a chance to be something else. Therapy, community service, community integration, these are the things we’re leaning on. We’re not fucking killing them.”

“People deserve second chances.” Texture-Of-Barkdust added with a hard note in her digital voice.

JP practically glared back across the table at James. “We’ve done this before.” He said.

“We absolutely have not!” Sarah rebutted adamantly. “We let people go before. This time we’re… I mean, we’re kinda just a big community prison? But a different one than society at large.” She glanced at James. “Is that right? Is society a prison?”

“As your lawyer I advise you not to answer that.” Planner said. And everyone paused and turned to the manifested infomorph. Had that been a joke?

James shook it off. “The point is, we are keeping an eye on them, because they are dangerous, yes. Just like half the people in this room. And… uh… the vast majority of people on this stage. But, like, the goal is to build a system where restorative justice is the default, and not just an accident. That means we actually need to try things, and now is an opportunity to do that.” James said with a shrug, noticing an intern passing Sarah a message next to him.

“If it’s a deciding factor, a lot of people, including the potions, would prefer James’ thing over the spontaneous execution?” Sarah said. “Also, hey, stop being such an asshole? We’re going right into being unprofessional today, but, how have you been friends with us for this long and still think it’s okay to kill people?”

JP opened his mouth like he was about to say something, and then realized halfway through that for the first time, he didn’t actually have a comeback. No snappy one liner or retort, he was just… angry. And he wasn’t quite sure *why*. Part of him wanted to chalk that up to some kind of outside infomorph influence, but it didn’t take more than a heartbeat to realize that he was just making an excuse to himself. Sarah - *Sarah* of all people - had just called him an asshole. That was… not a good sign.

So he took a breath through his nose, and instead of what he was going to spin, just said, “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry.”

The look on James’ face more or less made up for having to exercise humility.

“So… potions?” Reed chimed in again. “Because boy, do we have some potions.”

“I actually have a question about that.” Marcus said, looking down at the notebook he’d brought along. “Uh… so, the muscle regeneration one is the one that works for exercise, right?”

“Right.” Reed confirmed. “But *not* external source injuries. And do not ask me how it knows.”

Marcus nodded, having long since gotten used to accepting statements like that at face value. “Sure, right. Well, it would be really helpful for Response, but we’re worried about integrating it into our actual long term training program or operations? Just because it seems like it’s really finite. Can you actually make more?”

Reed had a pained look on his face, like he’d just been told that he’d have to return his Christmas gifts. “Uh… I mean… we were going to… it was…” He grimaced, then sighed. “Yeah, we can make more.” He admitted. “The formula is easy, and it actually seems like it’s optimized for volume.”

“Don’t do that thing.” Texture-Of-Barkdust chided him, swiveling to face Marcus. “The exercise potions are useful, but are among the lowest known value conversions for the Liquid of Information. Do not rely on a steady supply.”

“Got it.” Marcus made a checkmark on his book. Then squinted, and looked back up at the camraconda at about the same time as a muffled series of laughs went across the audience. “Sorry, the what?”

“The Liquid of-“

“Sap of Knowledge.” Reed dove in. “And yeah, she’s right. Which is actually what I wanted to get confirmation on, and sort of direct some funding and focus toward. The tree grows *about* a fruit a day, though the sizes vary, and I’ve got a *lot* of requests on different things to try. If we’re not interested in making this our business, we get a lot of room to experiment, and if we can devote more time to finding patterns, we can take more targeted shots on effects we need.” He cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his head, the unrestrained poof of curly hair on his head bobbing as he did so. “Also we have a lot of weird stuff around here people want to turn into potions?”

“Yeah, I bet we… yes, Intern Brian?” James said, his attention catching on the kid who was taking incoming messages from the audience. The lanky student, having gotten his attention, pushed a button in time with James getting a message on his phone, which appeared to be a link to a spreadsheet. He looked over it for about five seconds before looking back up at Reed. “Okay, yeah, I think about half the people sitting there watching us have already submitted ideas.”

“Great, cool.” Reed rubbed at his forehead. “We should have done this in secret.” He muttered.

“Hah, no.” Sarah barked out.

James shook his head and got them back on track. “Okay. Reed, what do you need?”

“Funding for a few supplies, and for lab rats. Alternately, if someone could make us a xenotech cup that could tell you if a liquid in it will kill you, that would be nice? I don’t really want to use animal testing, but I really, *really* don’t want to use person testing. And a lot of the recorded potion tests the Alchemists did were actually not good for whatever drank them.”

“Who did *they* test potions on?” JP asked, that cold anger sparking again in his chest.

“Also lab rats.” Reed said. “Mostly. Uh… mostly. We can talk about that later, if you really wanna know.”

“Okay.” James said. “If there’s no objections, preliminary vote; all in favor of going ahead with consistent potion experimentation?”

Everyone at the table raised their hands. Or, in Texture-Of-Barkdust’s case, a green circle of cardboard stapled to a stick.

_____

The blender hummed as it ran for about three minutes on the purée setting.

The fruit from the tree - no one was going to call it by the ‘official’ name, especially not while they didn’t have another “the tree” to reference - reduced by efficient mechanical action into a golden slurry.

So far, it didn’t appear to make any difference whether the ‘rind’ of the fruit was included. Which was, itself, notable. Because literally every other ingredient did matter, and that included ambient dust. They ran their tests now in a clean room, in hazmat suits. But the chunks of non-liquid material from the fruit were *entirely* neutral in potion formula, which was bizarre.

It did make it a lot easier to process them, though. No need to use an eye dropper to get every last spot of fluid when you could simply turn it all into a consistent mass.

The blender clicked off. The material inside was carefully moved into individual treated containers, to minimize loss. One of them was handed off and taken to be added to the current experiment.

A heating element brought a beaker of expired whole milk to just under a boil. A sterilized mechanical grinder powdered a plastic straw. Half a dropper of camraconda venom was dosed out. And exactly one standard tablespoon was measured of table salt.

Early on, someone had suggested using a cauldron. For aesthetics, and as a joke. As it turned out, while most of the equipment used didn’t actually matter, what the ultimate ‘final product’ was brewed in *did*, and so the cauldron sat on a shelf in the clean room along with a few other options. This time, the stainless steel soup pot was selected.

Milk and sap first. Stir by hand for eight revolutions. Add salt. Stir, until it begins to thicken. Add venom, cease stirring, dust top with straw powder. Let cool to 90F before stirring again, stir until liquid is consistent in texture, and it starts to thin.

Anyone could stir this one. For some potions, the species of the maker mattered. Those ones were far easier to identify, because they always directly affected biology in some way. It was hard for camracondas though, because no one had been able to make them magic arm rigs that actually worked ‘as them’, and so they had to stir and process ingredients with just their mouths and tails. Which was, at best, unsanitary, and at worse just impossible in some cases.

And that was it. Eight doses worth of… this.

The substance needed to be strained before going into vials, or it would cause short term nerve damage to the digits. But aside from that, it was perfectly safe. They even knew the effects.

But every batch, especially when the recipes were being tweaked slightly to try to refine them, *always* got most of its doses tested on lab rats first, before moving on to sophont trials.

This potion would make it so, for the next two hours, any living, growing plants the drinker made contact with would grow at a vastly accelerated rate. They’d been *absurdly* lucky to figure that one out from one of their volunteers who also worked in the gardens. For at least four potions, they knew they were perfectly safe to drink, but not why anyone would actually want to. They may as well just be bad tasting overpriced health drinks, without the information on exactly what it was they did.

This version was a modification, so they needed to make sure it was safe first, but if it still worked, whether it got stronger or weaker would be another data point on the ongoing search for the truth in the patterns of reality.

“Done.” Alchemist Red said, stepping back from the table, holding the rack of vials. “Are you through?” She asked Davis in a curt, but not unfriendly, tone.

Davis didn’t glance up from where he was monitoring the temperature on the distillation process for his own work. “No.” He said, desperately wishing he had a way to itch his scalp through the hazmat suit. The Alchemists had, among other things, potions that encouraged hair growth. And as the Order didn’t really have any plans to sell them to the Alchemists’ old customers, he’d used a dose himself. As a punishment for the previously-balding man’s vanity, his head itched, and he was trying to ignore it by staring at a thermometer. It ticked up by one degree, and he hit a button on the heating element, allowing it to start cooling. “Okay, yes.”

Inside, a potion that would probably dissolve the kidneys of anything that drank it sat. They would not be ever coming close to testing that on humans. Probably. It might not. But it did seem like even small steps away from known recipes could make them shockingly dangerous.

But they needed to know anyway.

Outside of the clean room, the two of them pulled off their suits and set them aside to be attended to later. Alchemist Red wore clothing that was butting up against formal wear underneath hers, while Davis simply wore a thin white shirt and shorts. He knew he was getting older, knew his body wasn’t what it used to be. But life with the Order had taught him two things; that the casual shame in how he looked was a poison he needed to purge from his system, and also that his body was what he made of it. Literally. A combination of exercise potions, purple orbs, and being one of the people who had been high on the list to get a Akashic Sewer textbook had left him in the best shape of his life. He’d played football in high school, and he was pretty sure that himself now could wipe the floor with himself at what felt like his peak.

“Good work today.” He said to Red as they made their way toward the storage racks for completed but untested potions.

“Hmh.” The woman replied.

She wasn’t, Davis had learned, *mean* exactly. She was just acutely aware of the fact that she was, truly, a prisoner. But she had a passion, wanted to be doing this work, wanted to be expanding their knowledge, and so the Order made it happen.

Her name was Amelia. She hated being called that, so Davis called her Red. It was still hard to not append ‘Alchemist’ to the start of her name whenever he thought it, but technically, she wasn’t an Alchemist anymore. She was just…

What was she? Floundering, he knew that much. He’d been in a similar boat, when he’d been dragged out of hell and given help without any question of repayment. Though Davis supposed he hadn’t actually killed anyone. Red had. By accident, omission, or direct action, he didn’t know, and he didn’t need to know. That was between her and her therapist.

What he knew about her was that she had ideas about their work. She had experiments she wanted to run, she spent her time reading and rereading the papers they wrote, checking the numbers, monitoring the lab rats and striders.

She didn’t use short sentences and clipped language because she hated anyone. If anything, out of all the Alchemists Davis had met - and he had met all three survivors - she was the *least* likely to ever be a problem again. All she had ever wanted to do was cure cancer and make people smarter and be praised for it, and now she’d been told she could do exactly that as long as she played nice.

How do you render a criminal harmless?

Give them what they always wanted. Just do it the right way.

Davis almost laughed. If you’d told the version of him that had voted for Bush a decade ago that he’d end up thinking that prisons were obsolete, he probably would have gotten legitimately angry. But actual results were harder to argue with, unless you were an idiot. And if there was one thing he didn’t feel like being today, it was stupid.

He stifled the laugh and slid the potions onto the rack, double and triple checking that the label on them was correct, before he and Red swapped sides and checked each other’s work against the database of experiments they were running.

Months of this work, and they’d only scratched the surface. This was a lifetime worth of study. Two lifetimes. Ten. A hundred. Years and years stretched out before them, of things to learn and problems to eradicate, all with the tiny golden glimmering fruits of a particularly strange tree.

“Lunch?” He told his charge. “I’ll even stay quiet while you stare at comparison reports based on stir speed.”

Red, alchemist, looked at him with one raised eyebrow as he rolled his shoulder and stretched out the muscles that always seemed more confined than they should be in the clean room suits. Eventually, she huffed a breath through her nose. “Yes, lunch.” She said. “And then live trials for the last production run. And then filtering, and…” she trailed off as Davis gave her an expectant look. “And then, a legally mandated rest.” The woman said bitterly. “Where I am required to waste my limited remaining life instead of doing real work. For my ‘well being’.”

“Good, you remembered.” Davis turned a short sentence back on her. “I’m thinking pool. We’ve got a pool table now, finally, and Nate has some weird homebrew beer he’s been sharing. And *then* you can get back to not wasting your life, yes.”

“I suppose I can amuse myself with…” Red trailed off as they made their way to the stairwell. “Hm. Brewing. It was never time efficient, but now…”

Davis shook his head. Red had adapted to her new life well, but work-life balance would take a lot more work than ethical behavior, it seemed.

_____

“That pretty neatly takes us to the question of ‘what are we doing with all the cancer cure potion’.” James didn’t need a schedule to remember *that* was an important part of the meeting. He glanced over at Reed. “Any thoughts?”

“We can make more.” Reed admitted. “Probably. If the research notes are real, and the alchemist helps.”

“What about the stockpile we ended up with?”

Planner answered the question in a voice that sounded like a dozen scribbling pens. “Forty thousand one hundred and eight doses.” They said. “Assuming the research logs we have taken custody of were correct, it would be possible to produce an additional three hundred doses daily. The ratio of sap usage is relatively low, as is the size of a usable dose.”

“It’s human-specific.” Reed added. “But so far, as far as we know, only humans get lung cancer? Also it can fix more than just cancer. It can’t heal missing lungs though. As far as I know.”

“Three hundred a day is a lot of miracles.” Marcus pointed out. “I’d vote for that over the exercise potions, if you decide not to do more experiments?”

“Same.” JP added. “Exercise without the potions is just a matter of time. Cancer without the potions is… well, also a matter of time, isn’t it?” He scratched at his arm in a small gesture that James was pretty sure he didn’t notice he was doing. But James had known JP a long time, and he remembered his friend losing his dad to the thing they now had, as Marcus said, the miracle cure for.

Sarah raised a hand. “What about duplicating the potion? Is that more efficient than the porps?”

“Porps?” James asked her quietly.

“Purple orbs!” Sarah said. “Like how the yellows are skorbs, or the-“

James started talking before he could hear any other new and terrible words for the Office’s magic. “Yeah, so, duplications.” He loudly cleared his throat. “I’ve already talked to Anesh about this. We can, in theory, do both? The por… the *purple orbs*, the ones that cure cancer, don’t just get rid of it; they sort of make a person long-term immune. That’s kind of an order of magnitude bigger than a one-shot potion. So we don’t want to completely transition to potion production. But the case that we use for stacking up purples could be waterproof without much effort? And potions keep basically forever if they’re stored at room temperature in the dark. So, we just alter our duplication case to be a perfectly sized box that fill the empty space with purifier, put a spout on the side outside the copy zone or something, and then drain it when it duplicates.” He shrugged. “Though we *can* just make a whole thing of lung purifier? But that’s not specifically an upgrade. I haven’t done the math.”

“I will begin doing the math.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said.

“It’s a quarter ounce per dose.” Reed commented. “How much could you actually fit in the gaps?”

“This may come as a shock, but orbs do not stack well.” James said dryly, and almost jumped when the audience he had forgotten was there laughed. “So we could probably get, like, twenty or thirty per copy? Is that right?”

Texture-Of-Barkdust swung her neck around to face him. “No.” She said. James looked at her with raised eyebrows until she added. “It would be more.”

“Good to know.” He said. “But this doesn’t answer the original question of ‘what do we do with the stock of forty thousand doses’. Does anyone have any suggestions?”

“Give it away.” Sarah and JP said at the same time. Then, breaking solidarity, they both started talking at the same time and it got difficult to follow either of them.

James raised his hands. “Hold up!” He said. “You’re both making the same point, and no one can understand it! We’re already giving away the cancer cure orbs, is there any other idea aside from just adding what we now have of this new solution to the mix?”

“We should change how we do it.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said.

“How so?” Marcus asked before James could. “Like, isn’t there a whole team for it?”

“We have two official personnel for that project”. Planner’s scratchy voice came in. “And three hospitals in agreement, that assist.”

Marcus widened his eyes. “Uh… wait, how many of those do we actually give out?”

“Two to three hundred a week.” Texture-Of-Barkdust offered.

“Then we should expand.” Marcus said with an assured nod. “I can get Harvey in on this; Response actually has a roadmap for future growth. Or we could just get James to hire more random people and set them on the problem.”

“Hey!” James protested, and was ignored.

Off to the side, he caught sight of Sarah being passed a note from one of the filter interns, which she read rapidly before looking up. “Hey, here’s a suggestion; why don’t we recruit from the people who go through the program?” She asked.

“Like… why don’t we give jobs to cancer survivors?” Marcus asked slowly, looking around at the others at the table. “That doesn’t sound… uh… like a great idea?”

“No, no, I can see where this is going.” JP hummed. “You know who hates cancer? People who’ve had cancer. Like, I’m not saying we do the James-hires-randomly thing that keeps inexplicably working-“

James crossed his arms and huffed. “As long as you acknowledge it works.” He muttered.

“-and that keeps getting us full members of the Order. I’m saying we do what Response does, where there are some people who are members of Response, and are focused on only its goals. If they eventually switch to something else, that’s fine, but they’re not here to be knights, they’d be here to help with one thing for as long as they wanted to, and that would be it.”

“It’s not like we can’t afford to hire more people.” Reed said, getting a pair of disagreeing hisses from Texture-Of-Barkdust and Planner, both in different tones. “What?!” He threw up his arms. “We’re one week away from being able to put a hole in the total yearly platinum use on Earth! Don’t tell me we’re still dealing with money problems!”

“Platinum is not easy to move.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said, not explaining which version of ‘move’ she meant, but probably meaning both.

“Honestly, if nothing else, we could just do it as a short term volunteer thing. Just help out for a month or two, then move on. Enjoy your extra life.” James said with a shrug. “But I would like to pay them in some way.”

“We’ll need to fold Justine and… Harvey? Wait, is the other guy’s name also Harvey? Did I not notice that?” Sarah asked. “Whatever, we’ll fold them into Recovery, just make it their dedicated job?”

“His name’s not Harvey, you just think that’s a professor name, and he looks like a professor. And is a professor.” James patted Sarah on the shoulder. “I’ll let them know tonight, and we can get this rolling. Because we’ve got a lot of extra cure for them to get to distributing.”

“Any strong objections from the audience?” JP asked, looking out at the crowd. No one said anything, and there was an air of excitement over the room. “All in favor?” He looked back at the stage, raising his own hand before everyone else.

James raised his hand with everyone else. “Stop taking my MC job.” He muttered.

_____

Jo Hyori walked through the halls of a community medical facility near the border of Sierra Leone, secretly wishing that he would at some point take the advice that business suits were not appropriate dress for everywhere he went. It was 32 degrees, and while the air was dry, his forehead was damper than a swamp. Most of the rest of him probably was too, but he decided it would be unprofessional to think too hard about how much he was sweating.

He didn’t feel comfortable here. He was an outsider to this country, this community, and this building. So far outside his comfort zone he wasn’t sure if he was still on the same planet. He’d lived his whole life in Seoul, grown up there, gone to school there, worked there, worshiped there.

Nearly died there.

Three months he’d been dying. Lung cancer. Caught too late to be easily handled. Surgery had been off the table, so he’d started chemo.

The worst part wasn’t that he was dying. He hadn’t been afraid to die at the start. The worst part was feeling himself break. First physically; he was tired more often, and then every day, and then even when he slept. The pain started, and never stopped. Breathing hurt. And then it wasn’t just physical, it was mental too. Constant pain kept him from thinking clearly, made him angry, irritable, unable to control himself. Sometimes, the painkillers would work, and for a brief window, he’d realize how bad it had been. Then it was back to the pain, and the exhaustion, and the inability.

The worst part wasn’t when his body broke, or his mind. It was his soul. Hyori, at the age of forty one, had been raised Protestant. Had been one of the pastors at his church for twenty years. Had been faithful, devout. He’d *believed*.

His wife and daughter had found renewed faith with his illness. They’d passed the test, as it were; his slow slide into death had pushed them to believe more, to pray harder, to refuse to be broken by the ordeal. He could respect that, somewhat.

But for him, it had just left him feeling empty. Hollowed out by the pain, the hunger from not wanting to eat, the exhaustion of not being able to breathe properly. Every other part of him was empty, and in that moment, he realized that his faith was not something that had its own reserve. It had always ever been drawn from the rest of him.

And he had nothing left to give.

Three months ago he’d been dying. Two months ago, he wasn’t.

A chance meeting with a stranger that was probably no chance at all. A broad wall of a Russian woman who had appeared in his hospital room one night, and demanded to know if he wanted to live.

Hyori had briefly thought this was God offering him one last out. A temptation that he could prove his belief by refusing. But… he did want to live. He didn’t know why yet, but he did. So he drank the tiny sip of foul cherry liquid the woman had given him, had a coughing fit that brought doctors running, and never seen her again.

Two weeks ago, he’d picked up the work where she left off. His coworkers included bizarre alien life, and ghosts. And yet his job was familiar; information management. Processing hospital records, finding people who most needed their help. And making a few deliveries.

He’d asked how they had all these hospital records, and been told that they had a program that stole them. He’d asked if that was secure, safe, or ethical, and been told that was a good question, and the answers were yes, yes, and hopefully. If anyone *could* steal the records from *them*, then they could get them easier from the hospitals themselves.

And now he was in Sierra Leone. Farther from a big city than he’d ever been. Melting inside his suit, getting strange looks from everyone he passed.

But no one stopped him. No one ever did.

Hyori found the room he was looking for, and entered with a knock.

“Good afternoon.” He said to the woman inside, before realizing he’d spoken in Korean. “Good afternoon.” He repeated, switching to Mende. One of the eight languages he’d learned the easy way, through the actual, honest magic that he’d just been handed.

The woman on the bed stared at him with suspicious eyes. “You aren’t the doctor.” She said accusingly.

“No. I am not.” Hyori answered with a nod as he set his case down on the foot of the bed, trying not to feel the sympathetic pain of knowing what this poor woman was going through.

She was different from him in every way. Different country, different color, different gender, different language, different dress. But she was in a hospital that smelled the same as the one he’d lived in before his false death. And her eyes, tracking him with suspicion and angry, held the same soul-breaking pain that he was so familiar with.

She didn’t say anything, and so Hyori spoke instead. Words he’d practiced and a feeling he didn’t need to, easing him out of his anxiety at being somewhere new and into the routine of solving a person’s pain. “You have large cell carcinoma.” He said. “Untreatable here, you’d need to travel to Port Loko to have a chance.”

“Your accent is terrible.” The woman said, turning away from him and staring at the far wall.

“Yes, I was given the language, not the experience.” He nodded softly. “I could use English, if you prefer.” Hyori waited, but she didn’t answer him, so he moved on. “This will fix your lungs.” He said, holding up the small hard plastic vial of liquid he’d brought out of his case as the woman whipped her head back to glare at him.

She snorted. “Nothing can fix my lungs.” She said with a bitter anger. “I am going to die, but I won’t be conned before I go.”

Hyori smiled. He’d said something similar. “There is no cost.” He said, setting the vial on the tray next to her bed, careful not to disturb the mostly clean sheets. “Nor expectation. This is a gift.”

“A gift of a miracle?” The woman didn’t stop glaring at him. “No one gives those gifts. Ever.”

“We do.” Hyori said, meeting her eyes.

The woman made to open her mouth again, but stopped. She looked at him again. Actually looked at him, like he’d learned to look at people. And saw something in his eyes that he knew would never go away.

“You may drink it, or keep it, or share it.” Hyori said. “It is a gift. But it will cure you.” He snapped his case shut. “I apologize, but I must go now. I wish you well.” Hyori turned, and walked out of the room, doing his best to ignore the question yelled after him.

He was down a hall and around a corner before he heard the woman coughing.

Perhaps they’d meet again when his department needed more help, he thought with a smile. They were, after all, expanding again next month.

_____

“Okay, what’s left?” James said. “Planner?”

The infomorph gave a vibrating hum. “Discussion of expanding skulljack use to something common. Following that, I believe we have one good question from the audience to address.”

A few people filtered out of the crowd; the rough outline for this meeting had been posted, and there were some people who really were just here to keep up on the Alchemist stuff. Which was fine; James knew they had a tendency to hit tangents a lot, but they should try to make it as easy as possible for everyone to be informed.

Sarah was practically bouncing in her seat as they moved on. “The skulljack thing!” She tapped the table between them. “Okay, so, basically everyone who has one of the things is already doing the thing where they’re skipping actually listening to my podcast and just sharing memory files, right?”

“I don’t think I have to answer that.” JP said defiantly.

“Yes.” James, Marcus, Reed, and Texture-Of-Barkdust all said in unison. Along with a good chunk of the people sitting around the stage.

“No.” Planner added. “But only because this body does not support it.”

Sarah’s face rippled with purposefully exaggerated consternation. “Well, at least some of you are honest.” She said. “Okay, so, we’ve spent the last… uh… decade or so, I guess? A while, anyway, living with the skulljacks.“

“It’s been two years, tops.” JP interjected.

“We need to stop being afraid of using them for more things.” Sarah said. “Even me. Especially me! The memory file sharing thing is actually super cool, and we should lean into that. Make sure it’s safe, and then make it common. Make it a part of our little collective culture. Even if it’s just for skills.”

“Actually, on that note,” James raised a hand to ask a question, “can you share yellow orb skills via the skulljacks? I’ve been curious about this. I know they transfer over if you form a fully linked mind with someone, but I don’t know if you can just teach someone something specific.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Sarah said with a beaming smile. “We should know that!”

Marcus leaned forward on his elbows with a nervous grimace on his face. “Ehhhh, okay, but…” he started, then stopped, not sure quite how to phrase this. “I don’t know how to say this but, ‘safety’?” He spread his hands. “Those things are real dangerous, and I’ve seen how easy they spread. There’s a *ton* of crimes that’re gonna happen when those get out to the general public, you know?”

“We do know. We’ve had this conversation before.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said. “We have been lax in preparing.”

“Yeah, I actually did hire engineers to start solving the security problem.” James said, turning to face Reed. “And then those engineers became delvers, gardeners, and mech designers.”

Reed leveled a finger at James, despite the embarrassed flush on his face. “Okay, first off, this is what we’re all talking about! You don’t hire people for one job, you hire *knights*! Also, *you asked for the damn mech* so don’t blame my engineers!”

“If we budget you funds, will you personally hire normal programmers and engineers to solve this problem?” Planner asked. “I would rather solve the problem than place blame.”

James smiled happily. “That feels good to hear.” He said softly.

“Yeah, okay.” Reed said. “I… guess I kinda just forgot, with everything going on. I’m on it?”

“Cool. So, as to Sarah’s question… well, yeah, it would be super useful if we could save memory files to be downloaded by anyone who wanted to learn something, Matrix style. But I actually do have a concern on that.” James said. “Show of hands everyone here, even you lot,” he addressed the few dozen people still in the audience, “how many people have gotten a memory recording of Sarah’s podcast, and felt like it was… different?”

He raised his own hand first. And, slowly, a lot of other hands and camraconda affirmative signs went up. Even Sarah’s own.

“Hey, hang on.” JP said indignantly, pointing at Sarah.

“Yeah, that’s the thing.” James said with a sigh. “Memories aren’t just information, it’s personal. We can’t download a textbook like a yellow orb does, we share *our* idea of a thing. Maybe that’ll be different if we’re sharing dungeon skills, and we *should* try that, but that might make it a bad idea to make this a large scale thing? Like, outside of it being Art.”

“Body differences also might complicate.” Texture-Of-Barkdust added. “We should test it though.”

“Oh, absolutely.” James said, and most people nodded. “But Marcus isn’t wrong. They *are* a risk, and I’d really like make sure we can keep from accidentally creating a whole new axis for assault charges.”

Reed nodded. “Like I said, I’ll get some people.”

“And I can get some testing volunteers from Response teams.” Marcus said. “I mean, yeah, I’m worried about it, but a lot of people still want skulljacks.” He shrugged and sighed. “May as well make it an official thing, right?”

“Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask. Is there anyone abstaining from getting a skulljack for personal reasons, or because they don’t like the idea of connecting to other people or something?” James asked. “Sarah, I assume you know this.”

She nodded. “I do. And there are. It’s a personal choice.”

“Oh, yeah, I agree.” James said. “I’m just worried about the good ol’ cyberpunk problem of creating a standard you can only reach through augmentation, pushing people to alienate themselves from their own bodies.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, I wasn’t worried about that. But…” he held up his phone “at least four people already have expressed that they are, in some way.” He set the device with the open chat server back on the table, ignoring the exasperated look from the intern who was going to pass that exact information on to him in a minute. “But then… don’t we run into exactly that problem with the dungeon stuff?” He said.

“That the rewards set higher and higher standards as they get focused into people? Yeah, everyone knows.” Marcus said blandly.

“It’s kind of hard not to.” JP added.

James frowned. “I mean, we’re trying to do our best to spread it out.” He said. “But yeah, I know it’s a problem. Especially as we get more non-delver members.”

“I mean, that’s kind of why everyone’s fine with it.” Marcus said. “Response teams getting armory packages that keep them safe makes sense, same with delvers or rogues or whatever. Basically anyone who’s gonna be in constant life threatening danger, it makes sense to try to… uh… not let them die?” He shrugged. “So it’s *logical* and shit, but it does still feel kinda bad to think that if I want the fun purple orbs I have to actually do the life threatening thing.” He finished.

“This would be solved in part if we could share skills.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said. “Is it a dystopian nightmare if the skulljacks are free?” She asked James.

“…I’ll get back to you on that.”

“It would also” the camraconda continued, “allow others to understand us.”

She said ‘us’, and meant her species. The particular frustrations and issues of being a two hundred pound seven foot long half-organic snake in a world built for humans.

There was a general agreement among the camraconda population that they didn’t want to have their own culture. They didn’t want to be a species separate from the Order. They wanted to be *here*, and *this*. But that didn’t make it any easier that they lacked opposable thumbs.

Even the two ratroaches that were part of the Order’s ranks had thumbs.

“There’s non-skulljack options, too!” Sarah added. “They just take more resources, kinda? Like, the relationsticks allow for literal actual power sharing, which is really wholesome and stuff. And we can make ‘class’ copies of the Sewer’s textbooks, which lets us spread that around a lot more.”

Planner gave an approving noise like rustling a sheaf of papers. “Yes, the textbooks. My species can use those. It would be interesting to try.”

“Wait, hold on.” JP tilted his head. “Your species, like, assignments? Or infomorphs in general? Because I’m still waiting for some kind of problem to come up due to how navigators are different from authorities or something.”

“…I will seek answers and return them to you.” Planner said.

JP held out a hand. “To be clear, I also think you should get your own magic? Like, just to make sure that no one misquotes me on that.”

“Uh, actually, are infomorphs not already magic?” Marcus asked. “I kind of assumed…”

That question, Reed answered with a shake of his head. “They’re magic in the same way your hands are magic. It’s impressive that you have thumbs, but if you gave someone else thumbs,” he jerked an indicative thumb at Texture-Of-Barkdust, “then they’d know it’s just a normal type of body.”

“Right but Planner is a ghost octopus who can eat schedules?” Marcus rattled off the pseudo-question. “Right? Sorry if this is offensive Plan, I just… uh…”

“You are a mass of primarily carbon who can eat flesh by melting it inside yourself.” Planner responded in a dry scrawl.

Marcus looked down at his hands, then sort of spaced out as his gaze drifted to the far wall of the warehouse they were in. “Okay, well…” he said slowly, “I don’t have anything to add to that. Sorry. I’m also fine with you getting more magic then. And I might skip dinner?”

“Okay.” James said, trying to wrap this item up. “Obviously, we need to be looking for more ways to share power equitably across our membership. We can make that a constant thing, and I don’t think we really need to vote on it right now. We can start putting together a roster for who’s on deck to get a new textbook or whatever else we’ve found, especially since those are small enough to copy sometimes and one person can’t easily use more than one or two. But that said, all in favor of starting to test memory files for the purpose of sharing skills? We can work out the exact issues of body autonomy and security later, I’m just talking about within the Order, as we are now.”

The vote was more mixed, and there were a few more questions from the audience that they handled about requirements and access. But ultimately, that vote passed too.

_____

Clutter Ascent was growing.

James wouldn’t exactly say the dungeon was growing *up*, because he didn’t know what the barrier between child and adult even was for a dungeon. Or if that analogy worked at all.

What he was sure of was that he had to walk a lot farther to get to the pillow fort this time. The path becoming… not denser, but more cultivated. The clutter more purposeful, the paths more designed.

The narrow trail he followed through the furniture, garden tools, and boxes of ancient crumbling tax forms, had gone from being a straight line where he mostly had to worry about tripping on something to a winding maze where dead ends and open clearings threatened to turn him around.

There wasn’t *much* maze, really. There was only one clearing, and two dead ends that he ran into. And the dead ends had both stopped at cabinets that were clearly placed separately from everything else. He’d tried one of them, and found himself once more plunged into sensory deprivation until he could solve the ‘puzzle’ of what scene he was supposed to imagine.

This one was a coffee shop during a cool evening. He opened his eyes to an open cabinet and a single small stick covered in carved markings.

When he finally made it to the spot deeper into the dungeon where the Order’s ‘base’ was, he’d been a little surprised by how many people had been there, how busy it had been.

Sarah was reading some kind of book while a clump of dense fog orbited around her head. Anesh was hanging out, supervising Rufus and Ganesh as the two of them played with the strange chimera creature named Fredrick, along with a pair of new life forms that had been made by the Order that looked an awful lot like Pendragon had as a ‘baby’. A couple of people were sweeping the area, doing some cleanup and basic organization, one of them the child care specialist James remembered hiring what felt like a century ago. And a couple people just seemed to be… relaxing.

Just relaxing. Enjoying the ambiance. Playing a card game and talking and so obviously calm. In a dungeon.

James loved this place.

He waved at Sarah as he walked in, kissed Anesh on the way by, and stopped by his target toward the back of the open ‘room’ that was this lamp lit collection of blankets and couches.

“Hey Deb.” James said to the woman as he approached.

She looked up from where she was rearranging a bookshelf. “James.” She said, with a small smile. “How’re things?”

“Oh, good.” He said. “Sorry to bother you on your day off, where I can’t help but notice you’re still working…”

“It doesn’t count.” She said with a defiant smile. “Besides, I’m on call.”

James snorted, but didn’t contradict her. She was technically right, but they also had expanded their medical staff, and Deb was more or less freed up to do whatever she wanted. Which… tended to be continuing to study for her nursing certification exams, which she said were coming up. Apparently she could legally use experience with the Order as hours toward the requirement; James wasn’t sure why they qualified, legally, but he suspected either JP or Karen or both had a hand in it.

Instead, he just held up the small black rectangle he’d brought with him, along with the cable and adaptor that just so happened to fit into the port of a skulljack. “Well, you and Anesh were both on the list of volunteers for this, so I figured I could catch you both at the same time.” He said. “Want to see if I got it right this time?”

“Ah, new memory file?” Deb half asked, perking up. She and James were on much better terms these days; possibly because she’d had a long talk with her partner about expectations and personal risk, but also possibly in part because James had stopped taking Frequency-Of-Sunlight into active fights. At least, for the last four or five months. He was absolutely sure he’d test their friendship again that way in the future. Or maybe he’d just ask them as a pair, and avoid that particular problem. Deb continued, ignorant of his internal train of thought, “Well, I suppose we have time. Is here a good place?”

“It’s specifically swordfighting.” James said. “Again. Still trying to get it right on something mundane before I try making Office skill copies.”

He’d been trying to successfully make a skill shareable via skulljack for a *while*. Months, by this point. It wasn’t literally the only thing he did, James did have a life after all. Even if he spent a lot of it delving, or recovering from delving.

The problem that the Order was running into, when it came to making memory files that could teach something complex, was that it *actually was complex*. You had to put a lot of focus into hitting all the little idiosyncrasies, all the base understanding that would help with the corner cases, and counterintuitively into not making the weave of memory too tight. If you didn’t leave enough gaps, the human mind would process it once, nod contentedly, and then put it in a box.

And that wasn’t how people learned. That was how people crammed for tests where they wouldn’t need to know the information two days later.

You needed the memory you shared to be able to make connections to the rest of the person you handed it to. For them to be able to integrate the experiences and thoughts into themselves naturally, without thinking, and without just letting it sit forgotten and unused until it was forgotten.

Weirdly, it was *close* to a problem the yellow orbs had. Though those didn’t ever decay or go stale if left unused; they were always there when you touched on them. Even if you could forget you knew how to build a chair from scratch when you didn’t build chairs that often.

James was one of eight people who’d managed to make bad memory files. And hopefully, if this worked today, he’d be one of three able to make a *good* memory file.

He and Deb collected Anesh, and James handed each of them a wooden practice sword, moving out of the pillow fort to the semicircle of open floor in front of it, standing among the dust dancing in the eternal sunsets coming through four different windows and four different angles.

Both of them took a minute to separately transfer the file from the hard drive to their personal meat substrates. Their brains rapidly absorbing the increasingly familiar file type through the skulljack connection. It was, importantly, a *different* kind of fencing than Anesh already had a skill orb for. But even then, it was part of the test.

And then, they raised their practice swords, smiling at each other with a familiar expression that James realized looked oddly out of place on his boyfriend’s face.

The two of them moved. Lunge, parry, two strikes deflected off each other, shifting footwork in the same direction, and then a strike that would have caught their open flanks if they hadn’t dodged at the same moment. The improvised duel sped up as they gained confidence in each other’s ability to defend, strikes coming faster. And then it stopped being a matter of just skill, as Deb leveraged her strength and Anesh tried to use his reach.

And then James felt himself slow down, as Anesh took a little of his speed.

And then, just when Deb seemed like she was getting tired, James felt a tug in his chest and behind his eyes, and she launched back into it reinvigorated.

The wooden practice swords clacked together another three times, before the one Deb was holding cracked in half, a part of it splintering off and tumbling to the floor. Both of them instantly freezing as the fight became far less safe and less practice.

“Well!” Anesh panted. “That was cool!”

“It worked!” Deb exclaimed. “And also that was super fucked up!”

“What, the part where you learned how to fence in six seconds?” James asked. “Or the part where it felt like you actually did the thing Sarah and I can do and drained sleep out of me through the bond?” He held up his hand, tapping the branded circle on his finger that tethered him to one of his best friends.

“No!” Deb turned to face James, leaning forward on her knees and panting, raising the arm with the broken sword to point at Anesh. “The part where your boyfriend is hot!”

Anesh turned a deep coppery red. “What?” He stammered out.

“I mean, you are.” James said easily.

“Yeah!” Deb said. “And a lot of your practice doing this comes from him, and now *I* remember it, except I also have all the times that you thought his eyes were cute whenever you crossed guards!” She leaned the sword against her leg and deliberately did not look at Anesh. “It’s *really weird* and I feel like this is not great!”

“Shit, I’m really sorry.” James said honestly. “I did not actually mean to do that. I didn’t even realize I put that into the file.”

Anesh dropped his arms to his sides. “I didn’t even realize…” he trailed off.

“I tell you you’re cute all the time!” James exclaimed.

“Well I thought it was metaphorical!” Anesh retorted. “Not literally a distraction when we’re sparring!”

“Okay, I’ve changed my mind. This is adorable.” Deb said. Then, after a brief pause, widened her eyes, “Wait, did *I* change my mind or did you?” She pointed at James. “Oh hell, I dunno if I like this anymore.”

James sighed. “Yeah, this is not what I intended. Obviously emotional bleed is going to be a huge problem. If it’s any consolation, you can ogle my boyfriend without reservation though.” He said. And then before either of them could utter the protests they were obviously going for, he added, “I’m actually more concerned about how Deb tapped into a bond that she doesn’t have?”

“The only bond I have is with Sarah.” Deb said. “For sharing temperature, not sleep. Did you actually feel me take from you? Maybe it was something else.”

“Try it again.” James said.

Deb scrunched up her face and focused, before letting out a breath and dropping her shoulders. “Nothing.”

“Uh…” Sarah’s voice came from the entrance to the blanket fort. “That’s my fault.” She said. Everyone glanced over at her, and she held up the book she’d been reading. The strange, weird, impossible book the dungeon had made. “I felt it too.” She said.

“Felt… the transfer thing?” James asked.

“Yeah. From you, to Deb. Through me.” Sarah added. “Here, try it now.” She cracked open the book, and looked down at it, getting quickly lost in its shifting pages.

James reached out, and found that he absolutely could. He could feel Deb right there, in addition to Anesh. And he could give or take speed from Anesh, but *sleep* from Deb. And not just sleep either, but something else too… But it wasn’t *just* them either…

“Sarah…” He started to ask. “What… exactly…”

She snapped the book shut with a thump of strange paper. “I knew there was something magic about it!” She exclaimed. “Now I know! When I’m reading it, it expands the reach of my bonds!” She pointed at James, then Deb. “You and I share sleep, you and I share heat. Deb, to me, to you! Two steps, not one!”

“Then all those other people I can feel out there as sources…” James said. “Wait, wait, hang on. There were, like, thirty people!” He looked at Sarah with an incredulous stare.

She sheepishly tucked the book under her arm, and held up both her hands. And then let go of the purple orb effect that let her recolor her skin tone.

Her hands, which were absolutely covered in the circular brands of the Attic’s relationsticks.

“Oh.” Anesh said slowly. “Uh… I just had a thought.” He said.

“Is it that Sarah lets us turn one person into a superhuman through the power of friendship?” James asked quietly. Anesh gave a single laborious nod. “Yeah, I’ve now also had that thought.”

“I like this thought.” Sarah said.

“When did you even open all of those?” Deb asked.

“I make a lot of friends!” Sarah answered. “Also how’d the test go.”

“Fine!” Anesh and Deb answered at the same time with different tones, before looking at each other, and then rapidly looking away.

Sarah stared at them, then slowly looked over at James. “OOoooooookay!” She said. “Soooo… that’s ominous, and also hilarious. Anyway, wanna come have some leftover cake and help me read a story to the dungeon and also the new dragons and also a raincloud and also…”

“Sarah you can just ask if I want to help you with storytime.”

“I could, but this way is more fun!” She said. “And then after you can show me how to make skills. And we can keep making ourselves more and cooler.” She grinned at him.

And suddenly James realized, anyone getting a skill file that Sarah made would probably have a somewhat brighter view of the world.

And he didn’t know if that excited or scared him.

_____

“Okay, what’s left for today?” James said. “And hopefully no more big questions, this has kind of run longer than I intended.”

“You always say that.” JP said, taking a drink from a glass soda bottle he’d manifested on the table. There was, at this distance, no way for James to know if that soda was completely unique to this reality, and that was a fun feeling. “Planner, I’m gonna assume you’ve already scheduled meetings like this every… two weeks?”

“Three is expected optimal.” Planner responded. “Karen and James have suggested a rotating panel of representatives for the time being. Everyone keep appraised of your personal messages.”

Sarah raised a hand briefly. “This actually reminds me that I got summoned for jury duty last week. I keep meaning to bring this up, but… what are we?”

With raised eyebrows and a cheeky tone, James started to answer. “The Order of Endle-“

“That’s a good question.” Marcus cut him off this time, and James gave an exaggerated pout that he quickly dropped when he realized he was goofing off a bit too much in front of a lot of people who did actually look to him for real decisions. “Are we a non-profit, or a business?”

“We are a people.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said simply. “As James says. A new society, and culture.”

“Okay, that’s cool and all,” Marcus slowly continued, “but there *is* a government that we’re sorta surrounded by. What do *they* think we are?”

“Either terrorists or contractors.” JP answered. And *that* got a few concerned words from the audience. And from Marcus. “I mean, they can’t *find* us, so it’s sort of moot.”

“Some of us actually have apartments, JP.” Reed said with a sigh. “And this *does* bring up something; we cannot just assume we’re gonna be able to take out anyone that tries to mess with us. We need more security than just hiding and hoping whatever infomorph lives in our head is enough to stop someone from breaking into our apartments and taking our stuff. Or lives. Or whatever.”

James sighed. “We could reopen communications with the FBI?” He offered.

An intern rapidly hurried onto stage, and started muttering to JP, who then looked up. “Uh… a lot of people kind of want to know why we stopped talking to the FBI at all.” He said. “And, again, good question. James?”

“They suck.”

“Good answer. Care to clarify?” JP rolled his eyes.

James sighed and turned to face the broader audience, deciding to stand and pace while he covered this one. “For those that don’t know or are new here, the Bureau representative we had here for a while was planning to attempt to kill some of us and steal a lot of our stuff, on the grounds that we were out of control and dangerous.” He paused, idly cracking the knuckles on one hand. “Personally, I have a problem with all of that. Starting with the fact that their idea of control isn’t working to keep people safe or happy, and continuing to the murders. And then focusing on the murders. I don’t think I can stress enough, that there were murders planned.” He sighed, and nodded at the group assembled. The camracondas generally just took him at his word, but he saw doubt written on the faces of some of the humans. “The FBI isn’t universally evil or anything. But they’ve got a lot of problems, and answering to them is the kind of thing that could twist our organization into something we do not want to be. Though I *think* we’re under a temporary truce.” He said.

From the middle of the audience, Alanna’s voice rang out. “You should probably check on that!” She called up to the stage, and a chorus of agreement came with her.

James laughed. “Yeah, I can do that. In fact, I’ll do that after this is done. I’m sure someone will take my call.” He said. “But back to the question of ‘what are we’…” He turned back to the temporary council. “Any suggestions? We’re sort of a government, sort of a charity, sort of an environmental agency, sort of a culture, and sort of a lot of other things. What are we, to other people, though?”

“I suggest we focus on government.” Planner said, perhaps a little predictably.

Reed nodded, wrapped within their ghostly arms. “Yeah, I can see that. Especially if we plan to start going forward with city building now that we’re adapting more and more of the orange totems.”

“The culture aspect is critical, too.” Sarah said, face unusually serious for the normally exuberantly cheerful girl. “Government as a set of rules and organizing principles is great and all for getting stuff done, but if we’re going to build and populate a city, we’re going to do it with people outside of us. And that means we need to have a culture that can absorb new people, and won’t break, and can do it *fast*. Because otherwise, we’ll pull in thousands of people with the promise of a better life, and they’ll turn around and make the same mistakes they were taught made a *good* society, and ruin what we were going for.”

“This is all fascinating.” James said. “And yes to both of you, but also this is something we’re going to need to get into the details of some other time, because right now I think Sarah’s original question was ‘how do we fit into the world that we are already part of’, or something. And, like… I can’t honestly say that right now being a member of the Order exempts you from jury duty.”

Sarah snapped her fingers. “Heck!” She exclaimed.

“You could look at it as another chance to make friends?” JP offered. “You do that a lot, right?” Getting Sarah to shoot him a look halfway stuck between a suspicious glower and a beaming grin.

“Alright.” James waved a hand. “We’re not gonna get anywhere on this. Let’s close this out. Is there anyone here who has a question or concern that hasn’t been addressed today?” He motioned to the center of the room. “Line up, there’s a microphone.” Or at least, there was as he finished saying that, and one of their young interns rapidly set one up at the front of the stage.

A few people had some questions. More than James had expected, really. But then, he hadn’t actually expected more than a few people to be interested in the discussion in the first place, once they got past the immediate crisis. The membership of the Order kept surprising him.

A camraconda approached first. A slimmer camera head and green and black cables in a pattern James recognized as Scent-Of-Rain. “Many of our youngest” the term they were using for the new camracondas taken from the dungeon; the ones that weren’t trapped for years in their tower colony, “having trouble with anger.” They paused, looking around almost worriedly. “They have not learned… time. Patience. I do not know how to teach them.”

Sarah started to say something right away, but stopped as she realized she was talking at the same time as Texture-Of-Barkdust. She made a gesture, ceding the floor to the other camraconda. “Trouble how?” Texture-Of-Barkdust asked. “They have not cause hurt, no?” She sounded on edge, like she’d been surprised by this, and James had to remind himself that the Order was getting larger and that the camracondas weren’t a single clump within the Order, but spread out across it.

“They speak without thinking. They lash out.” Scent-Of-Rain said. “Sometimes try to stop others when not appeased. And I do not know how to teach, except to say what happened to us, and I will not do that to them.”

Sarah glanced at the camraconda at the table with them, making sure she wouldn’t interrupt and getting a nod before she started talking. “It sounds like… they’re actual kids? Which makes sense; your species can grow up a lot faster than ours, but you still had to grow up. And you had high pressure conditions to do it in. How many new camracondas are there right now?”

“Thirteen.” Texture-Of-Barkdust answered instantly.

“That’s not that many.” Marcus mused.

“Yeah, even if we’re finding one or two a week, that’s still less growth than our human… population?” JP stumbled over the last word, and didn’t let it slow him down. “We’ve *got* the funding to throw at things. How do we fix this?”

“The same way we fix most behavioral problems.” James started to say.

Before he could finish, everyone around him except for a very confused Marcus echoed the same word, with different degrees of enthusiasm. “Therapy.”

“You’re all fired.” James told them, trying not to smile. “But yes, although the problem here is that camracondas might not react the same to *human* therapists. Especially if they’re young. And with a growing population, we can’t just keep relying on the three or four people we have here.”

Reed cleared his throat. “We already have a selection of yellow orbs for a lot of medical stuff. It shouldn’t be too hard to devote some time to finding ones for mental health, that we can copy, and distribute to anyone who wants to help.”

“Okay. All in favor of earmarking resources for this?” James asked.

Everyone raised their hands.

“Planner, make a note please. In the meantime…” He looked back to Scent-Of-Rain, who looked mildly confused that the response had been that rapid and positive. “I’d like to get a kind of after-school program set up around here. We already have a lot of human children at a roughly analogous development stage, and it would probably be a good idea to get everyone mixed together. But also have some actual guidance, and people they feel safe talking to. Can you stick around after, and we can start workshopping that?”

“Y…yes.” Scent-Of-Rain bobbed their body. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” James said instantly. “Look, I know that… sometimes stuff gets lost in translation, or doesn’t make it to everyone, but… we are here to help *everyone*. Especially people who don’t have anywhere else to get help.”

The camraconda raised itself back up, and peered at James through its lens. “Then thank you more.” They said.

“Oh, don’t thank me until you learn how much work it is running a club for teenagers.” James said, hearing a snort from Sarah and JP behind him who remembered the summer where he’d worked at one of those. And complained. A lot.

_____

Morgan, Brian, Color-Of-Dawn, and Resplendent-Pine-Smoke arrayed themselves before the greatest enemy the group of four teenage or teenager-adjacent life forms had ever met. Prepared to collectively stand unified against the most difficult conflict that most of them would have faced so far.

A responsible adult.

“No, you absolutely cannot!” El said, crossing her arms at them.

“But why not?” Brian, their elected spokesman said calmly. “It seems unfair that they get them and we don’t.” The high school senior delivered the line perfectly politely; they’d written a script and rehearsed it, even, to prepare for this.

El refrained from rubbing her forehead, groaning, rolling her eyes, or strangling any of the kids she was nominally in charge of on this bright July day. She, too, had some practice with this sort of thing by now.

And months of getting into being a guide for this growing group of miscreants, along with some actual training and some useful yellow orbs, had taught her a lot about the psychology of dealing with kids. And they were still kids, despite the fact that they were kids who were growing up fast.

One of the things she’d learned, and stuck to at all costs along with everyone else who shared her job, was that you *always* explain the reason behind things. If you can’t understand the reason for a rule, you’d better learn it, or change the rule. Anything else was stupid.

“Because,” El told them, “the skulljacks aren’t toys.” She paused. “Okay, that’s not true. But they aren’t *just* toys. They’re also kind of incredibly powerful weapons, and handing that to *you two* seems like a terrible idea. You, who built a catapult a month ago, and nearly hit Marcy with a high speed rock.”

“We learned from that, though!” Resplendent-Pine-Smoke chimed in, the camraconda’s synthesized voice bright and slightly high pitched.

“Did you learn how to build a more accurate catapult, or did you learn to not fire catapults when you might cause unintentional harm?” El asked.

The group looked at each other. “…Both?” Morgan ventured.

“Okay, well, that’s good at least.” El said. “And good job. But *also*, no skulljack. Because we’re trying to make sure those don’t spread until we’re absolutely ready to make them *safe*. I don’t want any of you accidentally wiping out your own personalities by accident, okay?”

“Then how come Color-Of-Dawn and Resplendent-Pine-Smoke both have them?” Brian said, hitting the next point of debate on the teenager’s script. “That’s not fair to us. That’s specism. Speciesism?”

El looked at the four of them for a long moment. “First of all, speciesism. I feel like James would be disappointed with me from wherever he is if I didn’t help with that. Second of all, that’s like complaining you don’t get a service dog like Navya does. A fix is different than an upgrade. Even though, *yes*, they’re also still upgrades. We’re working with what we have.” She held up a palm as the kids looked like they were going to launch into more of the debate. “*Third* of all! Weren’t you four making a short film this weekend? Why is this coming up now?”

“We already did all the filming.” Color-Of-Dawn said with satisfaction.

“Yeah, and it’s gonna be *great*.” Morgan added.

El narrowed her eyes. “You want skulljacks so you can edit video files easier, don’t you?”

“Final Cut Pro is a bad program and it should feel bad!” Brain burst out, abandoning their plan of debate altogether.

“I.. uh… I’m fine with not having one, I’m not the editor.” Morgan added. “But Brian… uh…” He shrugged.

Resplendent-Pine-Smoke chimed in. “We do not share his vision.” He said. “We are humoring him. Even if we are wasting time.”

“Hey!”

“Alright.” El laughed. “How bout this. We’ve got a whole stockpile of the things that grow programs. You tell Research I said you can use one or two, and figure out how you’d upgrade a video editing program. And in exchange, *please* hold off on getting the brain slot, okay?” She wrapped an arm around Brian’s shoulders. “You’ll have plenty of time to modify your body when we find safe and less spreadable ways, alright?”

He tried to shrug her off, but not that hard. “Fiiine.” The teenager said.

“Good!” El said. “Also, don’t think I don’t appreciate the hell out of you guys for showing restraint and actually asking instead of just passing a jack to each other without telling anyone. That kind of honesty? That’s good shit right there.” El paused. “Stuff. Or something. Oh, whatever, you probably all swear more than I do.” She sighed. “Look, the other groups are gonna be done with their independent activities in about twenty minutes. How bout you guys pick what the group activity is today?”

“Dodgeball!” Resplendent-Pine-Smoke barked out instantly.

“You don’t even have arms today!” Morgan protested.

The camraconda reared up regally, irising the lens of his camera eye. “I will stop us being struck. You will use your arms.” He said proudly.

El grinned and shook her head as the four teens ran and slithered off, arguing amongst each other like only actual friends could. Then caught herself, and snorted. “Man, when did I let James trick me into being a mom?” She muttered.

“You’re not bad at it.” Jeanne said with a calm smile, the actual mom overhearing El as she passed by, her own summer activity group spilling past her through the front door of the Lair. “I’m also not sure how I got tricked into this though.”

“You’re easy.” El said. “Your kid loves it here, and they offered you a lot of money.”

“Hey!” Jeanne put a hand over her chest, adopting an offended look. “That would only work for a very long while before I’d catch on!”

A camraconda voice joined them. “It works on many people, it seems.” Scent-Of-Rain added. “And I am informed we are letting the children throw things?” She asked.

The women shared a laugh, before El shook her head. “I let my group pick the team thing today, as positive reinforcement.” She said. “Resplendent’s getting a lot better about not freezing people who he thinks he’s ‘better then’. So that’s good.”

“The new ones learn.” Scent-Of-Rain said. “It is… we were afraid. We were afraid they were broken, and they knew. This is better. Being honest, being not afraid. They make mistakes, but they learn, and we grow.”

“Mine too. *Me* too. I think I’m even learning how to raise my own daughter better.” Jeanne said with a sigh. “Did you ever think… any of this?” She asked.

“No.” El said. “Okay, well, yes. But also no. But also, whatever, right?” She shrugged, not bothering to hide how easy the movement was, or how content she was in the moment. “It’s so weird here. *So* weird. Anything could change at any time. There’s no way to expect what’s next. So I’m not gonna try. I’m just gonna do my best, and have some fun.” She paused. “And also exploit the fact that people in Research think I’m allowed to ask for things now.”

“Is that why there’s a mural in one of the basements that changes depending on what part you’re looking at?” Jeanne asked with a curious grin.

“Look, the months get long when no one’s trying to kill us.” El said, as the three of them headed off to the equipment closet to get the dodgeball stuff.

_____

They ran through a few more questions, a lot of them operational in nature.

It had been a while since James had actually updated the Operations Manual, and he hadn’t really realized that no one else was doing it. Which was a big problem.

They sorted out some actual responsibilities for maintaining the growing database, which led into a question about how people were getting paid, and a conversation on the different methods of membership within the Order.

Some people were here as a job, technically. Some people were here because they had nowhere else to go. Some people were a bit of both. But everyone still, as had been pointed out earlier, lived inside a country that required money to purchase goods or services.

The Order wasn’t going to leave anyone behind, or trap anyone in their ranks by not paying them enough to leave if they wanted. James outlined the basic idea to everyone of paying a base rate to *anyone* who was on their roster, and then adding more based on responsibilities taken. Planner and Texture-Of-Barkdust had both sighed, and started discussing specific numbers.

Apparently Karen had been working on something like this already. The important part was, while it was detailed, it wasn’t over complicated. There was adamant agreement from everyone that all systems they built be easy enough to learn and understand.

This led to another concern from one of the Attic’s caretakers, that Research members were being unfairly overpaid, because of the number of extra orbs they ended up with in the natural course of doing their jobs.

That was an interesting half hour long diversion, where Reed tried to figure out exactly how many magic pens they’d broken in the last year. Ultimately, it came down to the problem that they didn’t really know how to put a price on the magic stuff. A single blue orb could be worth the cost of auditing a college course, or it could be worth everything you’ve ever owned twice over.

There wasn’t a clear decision on what to do about that. But Texture-Of-Barkdust promised that a couple people from Recovery would start looking into ensuring equity in terms of how orbs got distributed. It got folded into the project for better distribution of magic in general.

Someone from Response had a question about whether or not they were even allowed into dungeons, which James *almost* answered instantly, before Marcus made it more complicated by bringing up the fact that the two places required different sets of instincts. Response teams needed to be nonviolent in almost every situation, while dungeon teams needed to be prepared to fight for their lives at a moment’s notice. And training someone to switch that on and off was… a challenge.

When it was laid out that way, James realized that it was actually maybe not common among members of the Order that someone be willing to put their life on the line just to have an adventure.

Which was exactly what the last question of the evening was about.

“My husband,” the woman at the microphone said, “wants to go into one of those dungeons.” She had a rather unhappy look on her face, and James only vaguely recognized her from a couple sightings around the Lair.

“I’m sorry, I don’t… who is your husband?” He asked.

“Mark Diaz.” The woman said. “I’m his wife Marcy.”

“Right!” James nodded. “He’s scheduled for the next group to go into Winter’s Climb. Which… I am… guessing by the glare that is threatening to melt my lapel mic off, you do not approve of?”

The woman turned the glare down, perhaps realizing how hostile it looked. “People talk about them.” She said. “Like they kill people.”

“They could.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said. “Marcus was right. You must be prepared to fight, to enter one.”

“Well, then take him off the list. He isn’t allowed.” Marcy stated.

Two thoughts crossed James’ mind. One was that, in retrospect, it was kind of impressive that no one *had* died in a dungeon since the Order had started really delving them. Secondary to that, he hoped thinking that didn’t curse them. But also, he was thinking that there was no way in hell he was going to get involved in another one of these kinds of relationship crossfires.

He cleared his throat, and tried to speak evenly. “Marcy, I’m not going to do that.” He said. And before she could snap at him, continued quickly. “Your husband gets to make his own choices. And I could tell you that we’re going in as well equipped as we can, that we’ll play it safe, that we’re not planning on taking stupid risks. But you’re right, it *is* dangerous. I could tell you that I don’t care who goes, but I really, *really* do. Mark and Bill actually had a similar argument to this, *loudly*, in the lobby a couple days ago. Bill lost by the way, because he has kids.” He sighed. “I don’t want anyone to die and leave someone behind. But a lot of people want to be able to do more, to be more, to go beyond what baseline humanity offers. And all I can do about that is make them as ready as possible, and promise that if they die, their families get taken care of.”

“Or that we try to bring them back to life!” Sarah added.

James rubbed his forehead. “Yes, or that, thank you Sarah.” She shot him a thumbs up.

“But you’re still willing to let him risk death?” Marcy demanded.

“I hadn’t really thought of it that way before, but… yes.” James said. “Also, I’m not… like, I’m entirely uncomfortable being the arbiter in someone else’s relationship. You should talk to your husband, not to me. I *do* think we need more discussion about how people with families, surrogate or otherwise, risk their lives. But for this in particular, a more private conversation would be appropriate.” He sighed again. “If you would like to talk tomorrow or the next day, I’m available, and so is Momo, who’s in charge of the Climb scheduling. Would you be okay talking then?”

Marcy looked like she wanted to disagree, but James was disarmingly honest about the whole thing, and so instead she just nodded. “I’m sure we can find a compromise.” She stressed the last word, like she knew exactly what kind of compromise her husband would be finding.

She didn’t, exactly.

____

James’ boots crunched into powdery snow and he sunk two feet despite the snowshoes. The transition into Winter’s Climb was still jarring, but at least it didn’t cause the nausea and headache that the Sewer did.

It did catch him off guard when a fist sized chunk of ice shattered on his armor’s shoulder plate, almost sending him tumbling backward.

A hand that was already thick before the two layers of gloves caught him and pushed him back upright against the howling wind. “Fuck man!” The barrel chested man bellowed. “It was way too cold outside, now it’s hailing bullets in here! Australia sucks!”

James laughed into his face mask as he and Arrush unclipped the broad shields on their backs and strapped them to their arms, raising them in the direction of the storm, and beginning to push ahead, hailstones occasionally slamming against their guard as the other four members of the expedition kept low profiles behind them.

“It’s August, dear.” James heard Marcy say to her husband behind him, loud enough to be heard over the wind. “Australia is colder in August.”

“Well what about in here?” Mark asked his wife as the two of them adjusted the weight of their delve gear on their backs and followed after James.

Marcy glanced behind them. Through a gap in the storm wall, she saw howling empty air over an impossible cliff edge. Beyond that, maybe a mile, maybe a hundred miles away, a row of peaks rose like teeth into the sky. She could have sworn, for just a second, she saw a glimpse of another mountain *above*, towering downward from the sky itself to meet its grounded brothers.

“In here isn’t Australia!” She called back. “Now keep walking!”

James laughed at the couple, and took the advice himself, pushing forward.

Upward.

______

“Alright.” James finished, dusting off his hands. “That’s enough problems for us to solve over the next week or two at most. I’ll see you all again after I’ve had a reeeeeeeally long nap. Maybe a shower.” He smiled at the audience, folding his hands behind his back. “Thank you all for coming. Actually. This is… I don’t know how to say this, but this matters. All of us talking about how to progress, it *matters*. And the more we do this, the better we can make whatever world we end up with.”

Behind him, Sarah slid out of her chair, and leapt forward to wrap her arms around his shoulders, hanging off him in a dramatic fashion. “Also it’s fun to actually be able to fix things!” She added.

“Also that, yes.” James said, trying not to sag under her weight.

“Also you agreed to do two more things after this meeting, during this meeting.” Planner added as Reed stood and walked toward the edge of the stage himself.

“Also that yes thanks.” James grumbled. “Alright! Meeting’s over! Everyone go home!” He laughed. “I’ll see you all later, I’m sure.”

He was still laughing to himself as he walked out of the room, joined by Alanna, his partner jostling with Sarah for real estate on his back. And as he looked around the bustling first floor of the Lair, where people of multiple species, from multiple lives and backgrounds, congregated between jobs to talk, relax, and share their time.

James rubbed his hands together, smiling. There was always more to do. The reward for a job well done was, in the end, just more job. But these days, he didn’t feel bad about that at all. Things were *never* going to calm down, not really. But… did they need to? If he couldn’t handle it, he had all these friends and allies to help shoulder the work. They were, end of the day, all in this together. And they had a lot to do.

Time to get to work.

_____

End book three