“Hobbits were the peak of civilization in the Tolkien-verse. Jobs were gardening, stall at the farmer’s market, or mailman. Shoes off, capris on, six meals a day, high and fat as all shit. Names like Daddy Twofoot. Why the fuck were we ever horny for elves?” -Cryptid Coalition, via Tumblr-

_____

“Okay!” James clapped his hands together. “We own this room for about two hours, and we’ve got a lot of dumb ideas to work through!” He leaned forward on the wide wooden table that occupied the middle of the basement room, piled with what probably looked like a garage sale to anyone who wasn’t aware of what was going on. A garage sale, and also several bowls full of blue orbs.

The room was one of many spare rooms in their basements. The Order had a lot of basements; it kept coming up, and they kept using them for things. But the Order also had a couple hundred people that lived and worked in this building now, and so for the large group all purpose rooms that they had set up in this basement, away from anything critical, people had to schedule time.

Even if it was time for James to induct a group of students into the art of making magic items.

Five people had joined him today, spaced out a little bit around the table that he was leaning on. One of them was relatively new to the Order, one of them was someone who worked in Research but James hadn’t really met that often, one of them was a camraconda, one of them was an intern, and one of them was a body snatching potion wearing the shell of a human form.

“So, here’s the deal.” He told the five people who had joined him for today’s lesson. “For the purposes of experimentation, I am going to share very few details with you before we get started. But I will explain my logic!”

Everyone nodded, except the new guy, who looked very out of his depth and kept staring at the camraconda. “Sorry, I thought this was a job interview?” He asked.

“You’ve already been vetted by our intelligence branch, and two people have vouched for you. You’re hired.” James told him. “Now, the reason that-“

The new guy, a mid twenties guy with a blonde mop of hair out of a 90’s high school sitcom, complete with denim jacket to bring the look together, held up his hands frantically. “Time out! You can’t just… intelligence branch? What if I don’t want the job!”

James stared at him, taking one long blink’s worth of time, before he asked, “Do you not want the job?”

“I don’t even know what the job is!” The new guy protested.

The high school senior in the room, a bulky kid named Brian, raised his hand. “How come he gets a job and I get an internship?”

“Because you’re seventeen.” James answered. “Putting aside that you basically already get treated like a member here, you literally get ‘a job’ when you’re past the age of consent. Can we focus, please?”

“May I take a job?” The camraconda, Watcher-Of-Birds, asked. She did not raise a hand, she wasn’t wearing arms at the moment.

James curled a hand through his hair as he rapidly lost control of the class. “Watcher, you have a job.”

“Never had an interview.”

“Well, then you collect the standard Order stipend, and you work to uphold our principles and accomplish our objectives, as well as having a vote in the nature of our operations. Which is not a ‘job’ exactly, but it’s what you already do.”

“Ah!” The camraconda bobbed her head. “Good. I will be hired.”

“Yes thank you.” James sighed. Then, before he started talking again, he turned to the last two people in the room. “Farzad, Bea, either of you have a job related problem we should talk about?”

The researcher raised his eyebrows, sitting up from where he’d been tilting his chair back and flicking his eyes around the room. “I… uh… I work here already, I’m good. But I also never had an interview, I just didn’t leave after the dungeon thing.”

“Which one?” Brian and Watcher-Of-Birds asked in unison, and were roundly ignored.

The potion person made a shrugging motion, the twitch of her shoulders inhuman and artificial, but also strangely more real than when she borrowed the personality of the person she’d eaten. “No.”

“Well, tough, you get the membership perks anyway.” James told her. “Now! Anyway! Recently, Research has been trying to expand our range of options by creating more magic items, which I do not think I can keep legally calling dungeontech if they were made here on Earth. The problem that we keep running into is that we’re all very bad at this!” James swept his arms over the table, punctuating his words. “And I don’t mean we can’t make this work. We can. I’ve even done it myself, a few times. The problem is, the things I can make work reliably are… well, small. I can make a pen that changes font, I can’t make a pen that turns bark chips into potato chips.”

Watcher-Of-Birds perked up instantly. “I enjoy potato chips!” She exclaimed, before Farzed patted her gently on the head and hushed her.

“So,” James continued with a compassionate smile at the interruption, “the problem we run into here is this. If I teach you what I know about making magic items, you’re gonna learn all the bad habits I probably have. Because we have no way of knowing if we’re doing this the right way or not.” He rapped his knuckles on the wood of the table. “So what I’m gonna tell you is the bare minimum that you need to know to get started, give you the supplies, and then, we’re gonna try to make some magic. And if something works, we’ll build on that. Because we don’t need a solution to everything right now. What we need is long term knowledge of how to teach everyone in the next class.”

“But we do get to make xenotech?” Farzed asked hopefully.

“Absolutely.” James nodded. “So. Here’s what you need to know. In order to make a magic item with Officium Mundi materials, you need three things. A blue orb, which is the core of it, at least one yellow orb, which we think powers the whole thing, and may in fact not be needed at all, and then one discrete ‘object’. I’m not gonna define what an object is, because you probably have a kind of internalized understanding of how a chair is different from the floor, and the orbs probably share that.” He thought for a second, and then added, “Also, once an item is enchanted like this, if it breaks, it crumbles to dust that seems to be removed from reality. So.”

“Could we just use that to make magical toxic waste, and then break it, to get rid of toxic waste?” The new guy asked tentatively. “Assuming this is real.”

“Magic is real, don’t be dumb.” The intern said.

“Hey, don’t be mean.” James scolded the kid lightly. “He’s new here.”

“Oh, right. Uh… sorry. Magic is real though.”

James sighed again. “We’ll talk about actual apologies later. Anyway, good idea with the toxic waste. I’ll let you tell me after this if it’d work or not. Here’s your table, everyone should have a bunch of orbs, the bigger ones are more powerful. Have fun!” He stepped back, finally settling himself into the one chair on his side of the large piece of wooden furniture.

Most of the other people in the room shared glances with each other, like they were waiting for something more. Except for Bea, who made rapid mechanical motions to pick up a yellow and blue orb, and a classic number two pencil from the table. She didn’t make any human expressions like narrowing her eyes or furrowing her brow, but there was a sense of deep concentration as she stared at the items she was holding together.

Then the orbs were gone, and she was left holding a pencil, a newly forged magic item.

“Interesting.” James said. “And really fast. What did you make?”

To demonstrate, the potion person held up the pencil in both hands, and snapped it in half with a sharp crack of wood, and then set the whole pencil back on the table.

“Uh…” The Researcher next to her looked at the intact object with a concerned expression. “That… um…” He scooted his chair away slightly.

“Cool. Cool cool cool.” James nodded, appearing unfazed by the way the world had seemed to warp around the break point. “Okay. There’s some notebooks on the table too, everyone keep track of as many specifics as you can, okay? Good job. I’ll be here observing, don’t mind me.”

For the next hour or so, James watched and took notes as the five of them tried a dozen different ideas. He hadn’t told them they couldn’t talk to each other, so they shared their thoughts and attempts, and slowly started to develop a method of getting the blue orbs to do what they were trying to get them to. Sort of. They spent the last half hour of their time talking about what they were trying, and why they thought it did or didn’t work. A lot of it was hypothetical, but guesses that they could turn into results were what most of Research was founded on.

Bea, the living potion, seemed to be able to get results rapidly and consistently. But only in a very narrow band of ideas; she had trouble conceptualizing stranger or more esoteric uses for the random stuff James had presented for them to experiment with. None of them had any luck with the objects that weren’t typical “office supplies”, and a few of them even talked about feeling a resistance to trying to make the blue orbs shift into them.

James took everything they’d learned, and sent it off to the growing archive of things that Research knew about magic item creation. There were a lot of people who were better at this than this group in the Order, but today had still helped refine what worked, and what didn’t. Next time, he’d give them all the notes they had, and see what they could do with it. Assuming they could get enough extra blues out of the Office; now that they were actually using them and not just storing the ones they more or less unintentionally found, the Order’s stockpiles were starting to dip. Just one more line of logistics they needed to manage.

And Watcher-Of-Birds didn’t end up getting anything that could convert matter to potato chips, which was the real tragedy.

_____

“Shouldn’t the Sewer be closed or something?” Alanna asked as James spun the wheel of his car and pulled them into the mostly empty back lot of a local high school. “You know, because this place is empty and also closed?”

“They still do sports and stuff in the summer.” James reminded her. “And, wait, hang on, didn’t you have to do a summer school thing once? You know they keep using the building, even if it’s August!”

“You can’t prove that. It was a false memory or something.” Alanna folded her arms and twisted in the passenger seat of the thirty year old VW bug that James was driving. He’d gotten it for cheap, because in addition to having all the downsides of being an antique with none of the perks, it had also been in a head on collision at enough speed to wreck the car. And then he’d filled the gas tank out of their supply of gas from Route Horizon that was best described as ‘health potion for cars’, left the engine running for a day, and gotten a car that was in better condition than some show models. “Also! It wasn’t my fault! I only failed that class because the teacher was a creep!”

“Oh riiiight!” James smiled and nodded as he killed the engine, remembering their shared childhood. “That was Mr. Mart, right? Yeah, you failed that class because you broke his nose! God, I’d forgotten about that.” He paused as Alanna gave him a mock scowl, and then took the joking tone out of his voice. “I feel like I was probably a flippant dick to you about it at the time.” James said quietly, staring through the windshield at the back entrance to the high school. Not the one they’d gone to, but still, a familiar vibe of a building. “And I never really apologized.”

“Eh, fuck it.” Alanna shrugged. “You’re only a flippant dick now when it’s funny, so that kinda makes up for it. And I don’t have to do summer school ever again!”

“You were, on the way here, literally just talking about learning how to kayak next week.” James broke out of his mild emotional downturn and laughed.

“See? Funny!” Alanna told him, leaning over to shoot a tickling kiss at his neck as she popped her door open and wedged her tall frame out of the car and onto the asphalt of the parking lot that was shimmering with heat mirages as it baked under the summer sun.

James snorted, and followed, bending his arm at an odd angle to reach between the tight gap into the back of the car, and pull a duffel bag after himself. As he did so, another car with more leg room pulled up next to them, and a couple more people hopped or slithered out.

Deb and Frequency-Of-Sunlight had gone through a lot together. They’d nearly died at least twice, they’d saved each other’s lives an equal or greater number of times, and they were also dating, which raised a lot of eyebrows from people for a variety of reasons. For a while, they’d been in a protracted personal argument about whether or not Frequency-Of-Sunlight should be risking her life at all, after everything that had happened. Deb had gotten pretty mad at James during that time, for the expected reasons. They’d worked it out though, and the compromise appeared to be that Deb was just gonna risk her life alongside her serpentine girlfriend.

“Yo! Where’s Alex?” Alanna called to them as she leaned against the solid metal railing that split the concrete steps leading up to the back door of the building.

“She said to tell you she was dead, and could not be here.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight answered matter of factly in her digital voice.

“She had an allergic reaction to a guava and is resting.” Deb answered more realistically. “She is very ashamed, and it would be nice if you didn’t make her feel bad about this.”

“Why would I do that? Fuck guava.” James said, instantly deciding to back his fellow knight over any random fruit.

While Alanna choked out a laugh, Deb rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to go that far. Are we ready to go? We’re not on a schedule, but I do have some stuff I want to get back to.” This was probably just flatly true; James had a feeling that Deb was a workaholic, and that feeling was backed up by all observable evidence. She was around in the Order’s medical ward basically every time he was there, she was active in trying to generate shareable skill files through the skulljacks for a number of subjects, she was constantly around doing random extra tasks, and she seemed like she ended up on more delves than James did.

“I also have things!” Sunny said. That was probably only a little true. The excitable camraconda girl had been spending the last week in an air conditioned room eating peanut butter crackers and watching Youtube videos about historical events, finally having the downtime needed to push through levels of her Lesson.

Her Lesson, the magical touch of power that came from the dungeon somewhere below the building they were about to break into, required her to learn about history. Any history would do. Once she did enough, she’d get an option of one of three upgrades. And then she’d need to learn more history. James had two lessons, one for basketball which he’d stalled out on but which made him a worryingly effective sharpshooter, and one for biology, which currently made him a lot harder to actually kill.

Alanna’s Lesson let her read minds, kind of, which was why she was along today.

“Yeah!” James said, adding a cheerful. “Let’s rock.” as he brushed past Alanna and yanked open the heavy metal door of the school’s back entrance. It wasn’t locked, because at this point, the Order had four people working here to make sure the dungeon didn’t get up to anything shitty, and they had ways to make sure they could get in.

In a way, high schools were like dungeons. In that they were horrible, and no one really liked being there, and if you survived them you got the reward of an arbitrary accreditation. That last one might have been unique to the first dungeon James had found, really. But disliking the short labyrinth of scuffed tile floors and the unique smell of the school band practice room wasn’t unique to just high schoolers.

“This place is bad…” A small voice fluttered in his ear. Well, not in his ear, exactly. The still unnamed navigator that lived in his head was only a small bit physical, and most of what he said was actually sounding in James’ mind. “There’s no… no…” The infomorph struggled, looking for the word.

James provided it, pushing a thought forward. There was no wonder here. Just the repetition of classes and student migration patterns. Every inch mapped and uninteresting.

Until they made it around the corner to the basement of the school that didn’t exist, and found a rusted security door, blue paint flaking off, one edge dented in. If you looked at the building’s blueprints, this would lead nowhere. If you looked closer, you’d realize this door didn’t exist.

This was the entry point to the Akashic Sewer. The most hateful, arguably most dangerous dungeon, that the Order knew of. This wasn’t the casual apathetic danger of Officium Mundi, or the environmental trap of Winter’s Climb. This was a place that seemed to delight in inflicting pain, and if left unattended, would rapidly get bored and start sending its creations out to kidnap students to murder.

They were here on what James thought of as a rescue mission.

The group pushed through the door, found themselves in an almost totally dark room with a broken concrete floor and the steady drip of putrid water from a series of broken copper pipes on the walls. The smell assaulted them instantly, a mix of rot and vomit and spice that invaded the nose and tried its best to trigger the gag reflex.

That’s why they’d put on the filter masks before coming in. The Order learned fast when it came to stuff like this.

It took a few minutes to distribute their gear and get ready. Their standard body armor worked, but the dungeon ‘confiscated’ a lot of stuff that would otherwise be standard for them. So they worked around it; no guns, but they could bring in ‘brooms’ that were actually just weighted staves, or a set of tiny paper airplanes folded from paper they’d made special with a blue orb that would always hit what they were thrown at and were far sharper than they should be.

And then they were ready, and moving. Flashlights casting beams that didn’t go as far as they should, armor not feeling like quite enough to keep the moist environment out. But moving all the same.

“This place is bad, and I do not like it!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight offered as the human members of the group had to duck to avoid a part of the pitch black tunnel where the overhead pipes dipped down to head level, and had a serrated break in them like they were designed to take an eye out. Which they probably were.

James gave an unseen nod, using the end of his staff to spear a fist sized mutated cockroach that was advancing on his feet in a manner he did not appreciate. “Sunny has hot takes.” He told Alanna.

“She’s right though.” Alanna reminded him as they skirted around one of the few light sources the place had. They avoided it because it was a thin dripping trickle of bright blue glowing corrosive fluid. “Hey, so, this stuff, right here.” She pointed at it, her heavy gloved finger casting a sharp shadow in the illumination. “Does anyone else see this and think it looks the same as ratroach drool?”

“Gross.” James said reflexively.

Deb took a more clinical approach. “It does, yes. Arrush and Keeka both produce saliva of roughly this consistency.” She made a considered noise. “What do you think it means?” The nurse asked, looking over toward James.

“Hey, don’t ask me. I’m not really an expert. But if I have to guess, I’m just gonna say the dungeon is reusing ideas because it’s kind of uncreative.” James glanced back at it. “We didn’t bring stuff to take safe samples today, so we might have to come back next time if we wanna check. It’s probably not important, but knowing anything is better than knowing nooaaaawk!” His words trailed off as something jumped at him from a gap in the pipes, his inattention making him the perfect target for the ambush.

Rough scratching filled the tunnel of pipes alongside James’ yell, that was quickly picked up by the others, as the thing that had fallen on him tried to rip apart his chest. But his chest was well armored, and it changed tactics quickly, trying to scramble up to his shoulder and go for his throat, before being blocked by James grabbing at it.

It was easy to see, sort of. While most of it was shadowed in the dark, its small form only briefly lit up by the flashlights they had attached to their armor, the thing had a bright glowing orange point of light inside its chest that was simple to track.

Alanna tracked it best, keeping a cool head, stepping behind James, and reaching around him to grab the creature’s head, before slamming it into the wall of pipes; bone and muscle pulping against the metal pipe she’d hit it into.

A small burst of red sparks came out of the corpse, flowing into her hand. A reward for the kill.

“This is new.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight said, leaning forward to look at the body. It was a strange little quadruped; like someone had taken a rat, enlarged it, and stripped away anything that wasn’t bone and muscle, and a few tendons. A strange, wet, red and white beast that had thrown itself at James without hesitation. “It smells like gun fire.” The camraconda added, tentatively sniffing at it.

“Please don’t smell things here.” James said, wiping off the front of his armor reflexively. Then he looked at the corpse, and saw the orange light in it getting brighter. “Sunny, move!” He reached out and grabbed the camraconda around her neck, pulling her back and flinging her down the tunnel as much as anyone could easily move a two hundred pound snake. Alanna and Deb also backed up as he called, echoing his worry.

Then the rat exploded. Not in a deadly ball of fire, but still spraying molten blood and scraps of bone around the immediate area.

“Wow, this place is getting worse!” Alanna needlessly exclaimed.

No one disagreed. They made sure they were doing alright, and got moving again. They had some ground to cover.

They pushed on through the dark as quickly as they could while being safe about it. Their actual target, both of them really, were deeper in than just the initial tunnels of pipes and concrete and mild exploding rats. Regularly, one of them would smash an oversized beetle, generating a single red spark. Sometimes, they would find a door that would take those sparks to unlock, though they held off on actually doing that.

Once, when their tunnel opened up to a flat packed dirt floor, there was a strange disc with a handprint in it hanging from the wall near the ceiling. It was easy enough to get Alanna to lift Deb up to it, without spraying too much dirt in anyone’s face, and when she placed her hand on it a small burst of a dozen or so purple sparks burrowed into her hand with a small sting. They still didn’t know what those were for yet, but there was no sense leaving it untouched.

They pressed on. Crossing a small river of something that reflected a harsh and deep red in the beams of their flashlights, and smelled like liquified fish. Dealing with a few more exploding rat ambushes, and one time when a grey arm the length of a school bus tried to drag James into a hole in the ground. Passing around a stone altar shaped like a rectangular desk, on which something vaguely humanoid had been carved into pieces and left dead.

The smell got worse. Their small conversations died down as they started facing more resistance. Alanna and Deb dropped the talk they were having about a netflix series they were both watching. Frequency-Of-Sunlight stopped asking James questions about the Civil War. They all took a break for water, which was always uncomfortable here where it felt like imbibing anything was an invitation for some kind of rare fungus to take up residence in your mouth.

And then, at the lead of their party, James heard a whisper in his ear. “Close now.” The navigator told him. “Get ready.” He held up a hand, signaling the others, and they started moving slower, trying to soften their steps on the pipes and patches of concrete. Or, in Sunny’s case, trying to slither quieter. She wasn’t great at it, the sealed camraconda armor she was wearing making a lot more noise than her pseudo-organic cable body. But there was no way anyone was coming in here and running their whole stomach across the ground unprotected.

The next time the tunnel split, they took the small branch that smelled like wet dirt and unclean fur. And when they saw the mouth of it open up to another flat and circular room, they paused one more time.

“Coffee.” James held a thermos out to Deb. “You ready?” He asked her as she pried her fingers off her staff to take the magical drink from him.

“No.” She answered in a voice that cracked despite her attempt to stay calm. “I hate this part.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it.” Alanna said. “You hang back, your job is just to leave. Let us handle the this part part of this.”

James stared at his partner, mouth hanging open behind the mask that was the only barrier between his lungs and the fetid air of this dark place. “…What the fuck did you just say?”

“I dunno!” Alanna admitted cheerfully. “But the point is, stay behind us.”

Deb nodded, the humor washing past her. “Why… Christ, why does it feel so different than the rest of it?”

“Because it’s different.” James told her, taking the thermos back and popping his mask off his face just long enough to chug what was left, already feeling his reaction time start to sharpen, and not from the caffeine. “Because they might be people, and they’re absolutely more dangerous.” He clapped a hand on her shoulder. “But Alanna’s right. Stay behind us, keep Sunny safe, and bail the instant it looks like anything goes wrong.”

“Right.” Deb nodded. “Right! Okay. I’m ready.”

“I, too, am ready!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight added. “I will keep you safe, do not worry.” She butted her helmeted head against Deb’s hip, the artificial arms she was wearing whirring as she moved them aside to make the gesture. “I am very powerful.”

“It’s true. Okay. Alanna?”

“‘M good.”

“Let’s go then.” James said, and walked into the flickering pale light of the cleared space, some kind of glowing moth creature pretending to be lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. They were mostly harmless, unless they thought you hadn’t noticed them. James pointed right at them, just so they’d know the score, and they fluttered slightly but didn’t descend.

The room was much like the last couple they’d passed through. Hard dirt packed down to a surface that would have made for a decent hiking trail, if patches of the ground weren’t torn up where holes had been dug down. The walls were broken tile, and against the back wall from where they’d entered, a risen dirt basin of something thick and luminescent sat, with a pair of brown lumps slumped over it that it took the mind a minute to realize were bodies, though not human ones.

The room was also occupied.

The small burrows were filled with shapes that reacted to the presence of the delvers. Some slow, some worryingly quick, the ratroaches that dwelled here unfolded their many limbs, grabbed for whatever salvaged and makeshift weapons they had, and moved in response to the invasion of their home.

“Hello.” James said in a voice that was both compassionate and firm, the word carrying over the sounds of scratching and hissing. “We’re here to try to help.”

A ratroach, a roughly human shaped creature made of slapped together parts from rats and bugs, this one with a third arm growing at an odd angle out of its left thigh, a face that has a zig-zag pattern of chitin cutting through the furred muzzle, and angry red infected lines on its flesh where the skin and chitin met, exploded forward as soon as James stopped speaking. It had a knife made of a spike of metal wrapped in rotting leather, and it tried to drive it into his eye, stumbling as its own speed got beyond what it could make the body it was wearing do.

Alanna caught its arm, and looked at it. Like James, Alanna also had a Lesson from this place, but her lesson gave her the reward of empathy. And three steps up that path of growth, she could read the feelings coming off of almost anything, human or not. But when she looked at the ratroach she was holding, who was still trying to land punches on her armored torso while she disarmed it, she got a sinking pit of a sensation in her stomach.

“Empty.” She said to James. “It’s not even angry. It’s just… empty. Nothing.” Pulling the ratroach close, Alanna took a grip on the creature’s poorly made form, and did her best to snap its neck as quickly as she could.

The thing about Alanna’s power that was sometimes inconvenient was that she couldn’t really turn it off. And so, when James’ lit up with enough anger to melt through steel, before he shoved it down and blocked the next incoming attack from another cobbled together monster, Alanna got some of that too.

She just wasn’t as good at putting it aside as he was.

Three more ratroaches tried to kill them. And one by one, Alanna looked at them with an eye for those ephemeral details of deeper feeling. “Empty.” She said sadly. “Empty.” She repeated, letting James know he didn’t need to keep holding back on his current opponent. “Em- scared!” The word caught her off guard, as did the sensation. “Deb!” Alanna grabbed the sharp ceramic spear from the ratroach who was trying to stab her, leaving gashes on its three-fingered hands as she threw the weapon aside and spun the furred thing to the ground in a throw that ended with a puff of dirt from the floor and spores from its fur. “Calm it down!”

“”Right! Right right, that’s so fucking easy.” Deb muttered to herself, trying to take deep breaths as she fumbled out the laser pointer that she had in a pouch on her belt. “Calm. I’m calm. I can be calm.” The woman repeated to herself, trying to steady her emotions. Then she leveled the laser pointer at the ratroach, and pushed the button with the softest of clicks.

A long time ago, someone had found a laser pointer in Officium Mundi that did something weird. That wasn’t really a surprise, they found weird things all the time. But this one was weird, and useful, and small enough they could make a lot of copies of it. And so, the laser pointer that shared your emotions with whoever you hit, became a part of a lot of their toolkits.

Deb wasn’t really calm. She was still nervous, and scared. But she also had a couple other things in there too. She was worried for the ratroach, worried for her friends, and she really wanted to help. And all of that flowed neatly into the creature Alanna was pinning down. Well, at first. Alanna let go rapidly, and moved to block another knife that had just been thrown at her head, as soon as Deb took away the overwhelming fear and replaced it with a calmer, more managed version of the feeling.

The fight didn’t last much longer. James and Alanna, with Frequency helping out by occasionally freezing a ratroach in place, took down and dispatched all the enemies that were just empty puppets for the dungeon. Alanna didn’t even get hurt, though James had been kicked in the knee by a ratroach that had an overdeveloped leg, and was rubbing at the aching joint.

There were still ratroaches left, but none of them had charged the group. Two of them, both with scraggly brown fur that blended into the dirt they were huddled in, had held back in their small holes in the middle of the room. One of them were staring at James and Alanna with a set of three mismatched unblinking eyes, while the other had just turned away, misshapen paws held over its triangular head, slowly rocking back and forth.

James steadied his breathing. Let his heart stop hammering from the adrenaline rush of dealing with something that legitimately wanted to kill you. And then, he took a step forward, and handed off his staff to Alanna, holding his arms out.

“Hey.” He said quietly, a wet waver in his voice. “We’re here to try to help.” He moved forward a little more, and the ratroach that was watching him, eyes locked on like lasers, flinched back. James stopped moving, and dropped to a crouch, bringing himself down to the ratroach’s level. “You do not look like you are having a good day.” He said in that same quiet tone, like he was talking to a scared dog. “Would you like to leave here? I know it’s scary, and I know we just killed a lot of your people, but we aren’t going to hurt you.”

The ratroach he was looking at slowly, ever so slowly, tilted its head to over where Deb was now calming down in earnest, and the member of its species that had attacked the delvers, sitting upright and cautiously accepting a granola bar from Frequency-Of-Sunlight. Then it looked back at James, curiously tilting its head, a line of blue liquid splashing from its broken muzzle to carve a sizzling line in its fur alongside several matching dark marks.

“Yeah, all of you.” James said. “You feel, you think.” He glanced at the one that had attacked them. “You might even care about each other. I don’t know why you and not the others, but you’re alive. And no one should have to live here.”

It took a little more than just a promise in a language the ratroach might not fully understand to coax it out of the hole it had buried itself in. Even longer for the one that refused to look up at James, and who Alanna told him was feeling nothing but resigned terror. While he talked, and sat with them unarmed, trying to make them as comfortable as he could, Alanna took the jugs they’d brought along and filled them with a fresh supply of the bizarre liquid that pooled here in the back of the room.

The Order called it Shaper Substance, and it offered unparalleled, intensely painful, control over one’s own body. They had a lot of possible uses for it, and a lot more tests before they could do those things safely.

While two of the ratroaches seemed to both understand, and be willing to leave, the third one didn’t look up from where it cowered in its hole. Which was a problem, when a furious shriek echoed from down an upcoming tunnel. This had happened last time a team had come here, too; at a certain point, the dungeon’s version of a boss fight got pissed enough to start hunting them. Which was fair; they were going to cheat anyway.

“Deb, can you take these two back? Alanna and I will join you in a minute, if you could get an isolation room ready.”

“Of course.” Deb’s voice was professional as she reached out and offered a hand to one of the ratroaches, Sunny taking the other one, and eventually getting the dungeon creations to hold hands in a way that they seemed intensely eager to avoid. “I will see you back at the Lair.” She said, pulling a telepad page and vanishing.

“So, what now?” Alanna asked, gesturing to the ratroach that wouldn’t even look at them. “It’s painfully scared, dude.”

“I think it was you that reminded me, a while back, that you can’t always ask a victim if they want to stop being abused. Sometimes you just have to solve the problem.” James said. “I’m gonna put a hand on it. Ready?” Another shriek sounded, far closer this time.

“Ready!” Alanna said, flourishing a telepad. “Do we wanna give Deb some time?”

“Innnvhaders!” A raspy buzzing voice screamed at them from down the hallway, something with better night vision than James had having spotted them, heavy slaps of claws on metal sounding as the most dangerous ratroach in this place rushed them.

“Nope!” James answered Alanna’s question, grabbing her hand and reaching down to gently place a hand on the terrified creation’s shoulder, feeling it tense and flinch under his steady grip. And then, with a pop of displaced air, they were somewhere else.

Cleanup would take some time; they all needed to go through decontamination. But that was what the room they aimed their telepads at was for anyway, and even if their new arrival was curling into a ball on the floor, screaming in terror, they’d still accomplished their goals.

“I fucking hate that place.” Alanna spat out.

No one disagreed.

_____

Anesh found his partners in the elaborate, somewhat magical bath, deep in one of the Lair’s basements.

If you had asked him, even a year ago, if he would be comfortable bathing around other people, he probably would have said no. Even after getting used to it, it was still something different that didn’t quite feel like it fit his life, for a while. But it was a very nice bath, with magically purified water, dividing screens for if you or a small group did want some privacy, and an aesthetic of wood and copper tones that made the whole place feel like it was very cozy, in a magical way.

Also there was a mosaic on one wall of Rufus, the living stapler rendered in loving tile detail. In the mosaic, he was covering his eye with one of his pen legs, because that was only polite. It was the kind of touch that happened a lot around here, that just made a person smile when they noticed it.

Anesh found James and Alanna easily enough; they had taken one of the sections of the bath near the door, and neither of them really cared about putting up the large privacy screen. It was weird, kind of, Anesh thought, how everyone here had sort of adapted to this style of doing things. But then, really, when you got down to it, they’d had to adapt to things a lot weirder and more dangerous than bathing and mild nudity. So maybe he was the weird one.

As he arrived, Alanna was trying to drown James for some reason. “I assume this is deserved?” Anesh asked, his soft English accent betraying amusement and a total lack of concern.

Alanna sheepishly tucked her hands behind her back as Anesh caught her off guard. “Uh… yes?” She grinned at him as James sputtered to the surface, long hair plastered across his face like a mask of threads. “He started it.” She settled on.

“Anesh help I’m being bullied!” James reached out for his boyfriend. “I barely did anything!”

“Oh, I think we both know that’s not true.” Anesh said, setting himself cross legged on the edge of the large pool. He was happy to hang out, but he wasn’t here to get wet. After all, he hadn’t been the one covered in mud and spores, and he had stuff to do in a bit that would be more comfortable if he was dry. “How did things go?”

James went quiet, Alanna slipping away to start idly paddling around the pool, sometimes dipping below the surface as she swam. “It…” James said eventually, “it was okay. We finally found more ratroaches that weren’t just mindless puppets. They’re recovering downstairs now.”

“That’s great!” Anesh said, giving a warm smile that faded quickly. “Isn’t it? That was what you were looking for.”

“I guess.” James said. “But, it took this long. And one of them is not doing okay.” He sighed, wiping his hair off his face and trying to get it to stay put, which was a losing endeavor as the water kept letting it drift around. “The shaper substance is good, obviously, but I can’t stop worrying about… I dunno, everything this place does.”

Anesh hummed, partly to himself. “I understand what you mean. I feel guilty, because it’s almost a relief that it keeps making puppets and not people, in a way.”

“The puppets are fucking creepy!” Alanna called from the other end of the pool before shoving herself off the wall to float back their direction.

James snorted, finding a shallow spot to stand on the pool’s tile floor, and leaning over the lip to talk to Anesh. “I don’t think it’s bad to want an unambiguous enemy. I think the shitty thing is that the dungeon is obviously still making both puppets and people, but the ones that can feel are… it’s like they’re being purposefully indoctrinated to violence and anger? Like the place is the perfect environment for learning how to hate everything, and so every time it makes a ratroach or something else that can feel, it’s setting them up for failure.”

“It’s trying to make more like the beautiful one, you think?” Anesh asked.

“Probably.” James shrugged, shaking his head as he thought about the modified white furred ratroach that guarded the exit and screamed exaltations to the dungeon she thought of as a god. “We really need to remove her from that place, and get her into therapy.”

“Therapy can’t solve everything.” Alanna said with a grim tone. “If she wants to be religious, there’s only so much you can do.”

“Uh…”

“I meant violent.”

“Okay, we’re not gonna dig into that right now.” James said as Alanna ducked back under the water and started swimming around his legs. “But we don’t actually have to kill her. We can… we can just remove her from where she can cause harm, and…” He trailed off, and sighed, looking down at his hands with a distant stare. “I doubt she’ll ever thank us. But she’s still a person, and I’m not fucking kidding when I say I don’t believe in capital punishment.”

Anesh shrugged. “I’m with you there. We’ll need an actual way to keep her isolated though. I’m not saying prison, don’t give me that look you wanker. I’m just saying… somewhere separated and where we can be safe about it.”

“I’ll bring it up at the next meeting so Karen can scowl at the budget.” James said. “Oh, hey, not that it’s not great to see you every time you’re around, but what brings you down here anyway? I ask since you’re still unfortunately dressed.”

Anesh’s bronze skin turned a darkly flushed shade of deep red as he blushed. “Now see here…” he started to say.

“I’d like to, but you’re still wearing pants. This is hardly fair.” James gave his most beaming smile, while Alanna, who had perched on the other side of Anesh against the wall of the pool, made encouraging nosies.

“Now I’m being bullied.” He grumbled, but with a good natured smile that spoke to the fact that this was well within what he expected from his partners. “No, I came down to tell you that Research has decided to throw a party, because something stupid worked the way they wanted it to, and there’s gonna be pizza in a half hour or so.”

“Who ordered pizza to our secret base?” James asked with a confused snort of laughter.

Anesh leaned down to splash at him. “We’re making pizza you absolute goof. You have personally taught at least six people here how to make pizza. You know how this works.”

Laughing in earnest, James started to pull himself out of the pool. “Alright, alright!” He said, grabbing a warm towel and handing another to Alanna as she climbed out after him, a trail of water cascading off both their forms as they started drying off. “I’d love to get some pizza and relax with you. Because I am way too sore to actually move around any more tonight.”

“I’m not! I’m inexhaustible!” Alanna informed them. “Which is weird, because you’re the one with a literal endurance stat.”

“Only works if I’m pushing.” James shook his head. “Doesn’t do anything when I’m sitting around.”

Alanna’s face lit up with a sadistic smile. “Then you need a jog!” She said.

“No!” Anesh cut in. “Pizza, Alanna!” He paused, and then set a hand on her head in a thoughtful manner. “Then you can make James run. And not me. Please.”

James was smiling as he watched the two of them start to banter, while he dried off and pulled on the clean clothes he always kept at the Lair these days. Despite renting an apartment, he practically lived in this building. After dressing, James made his way over to the hooks on the wall where a few specific magical items were kept.

Copies of the same brooch, these looted artifacts from a rival and far more evil organization were capable of purifying food. And, it turned out, water counted. Even when it was filled with soap, dirt, and whatever else had clung to them from the Sewer. The one James grabbed had also recently leveled up enough to unlock a new power, which let it bind itself to a processor.

It was an infuriatingly vague power that did nothing. But it was something new, which was always exciting.

Though seeing that did bring a question to mind. “So hey!” He asked Anesh, cutting off the deep kiss his boyfriend was sharing with Alanna. “What exactly did Research get working anyway?”

“Oh, you know that goofy little plant pot that grows anything you put in it as a succulent?”

“Yes?” James asked. “Wait, no. I forgot about that. That’s kinda cool though.”

“Yeah, well, it can grow a cactus that makes the same magical fruit that the magical alchemy tree grows. Just slower. But hey, magical cactus!” Anesh smiled as James walked past where Alanna was rapidly drying herself with mechanical motions, not even bothering to try to be gentle with her skin that didn’t really get scratched up anyway. “And so pizza, as a treaaamph!”

His last word got garbled as James took over the kiss from where Alanna had left off.

“Alright!” James said with a happy smile. “Today’s been a good day. Let’s grab lunch.”