NOTES book 3 orbs, books, totems, potions

SHOULD BE------ NOTES book 3 orbs, books, totems, totem copier, maps, globes, other

should place the totem copier here. but ended in physical magic item and stuff the totem copier / projector copies.

should place the "emerald chips" here as well (programming chips that grow programs).

should place "clutter ascent' (fredrick home -> attic -> dungeon) pieces of wood that bond people here.

should place "El road dungeon" -> car parts to this list, along with MAPS = spells?

should place "winter climb" (Australia -> dungeon montain) -> text books + book + winter climb leaving rewards

should place "knowledge tree / sap of knowledge" along with potions in this area

131 high dungeon -> books

The green sparks they had were enough to crack several lockers. They made it out of there with a water-damaged romance novel, a cliff notes version of some Shakespere play, a biology textbook, two spiral notebooks, and something that James was pretty sure was a German copy of a Harry Potter book.

Each of them picked one of them, as they made their way through the blue metal door and past where Lua was still sitting keeping watch. It dropped them out right where they’d started.

James offered a book to Lua as well, and she accepted it. Each of them knew the value of having a little extra edge. Which left the ***romance nove*l and a spiral notebook** to be tested out with the magic copy process, to see if they could start to spread the stat upgrades from this place into the whole of the Order as part of their loadout package.

One by one, they cracked open the books they’d chosen.

It was either minutes or hours later that James looked up from whatever he was reading, the physical object of the book fading into dust that itself faded down into something smaller and smaller until it was gone from reality. And then, in the back of his head, the thought he’d been waiting for.

[Lesson Begun : Biology 0/200

Lesson Continues : Basketball 64/1200]

He looked around at the other three members of the Order, and asked the obvious question. “What’chall got?”

***“US History.” Daniel said, a little disappointed. “I… don’t like history. Dammit.”***

***“I’ll link you a Youtube channel.” James promised. “Sarah?”***

***“Art! I finally got art!” She exclaimed with delight.***

“Finally? How many of these have you used?” ***Lua asked her. “I’ve been watching the door the whole time…” She glanced between the entrance to the dungeon and the young woman doing a small shuffling dance in the hallway. “Also I got geometry.*** ***Does it not tell you what you get for completing it?”***

***“Not until your first upgrade.”*** James said sadly, unbuckling the damaged and dripping pieces of his armor. “Daniel, empty your bag into mine, let’s use yours to store all the gross stuff.”

132 rank 2 orb

***“Fair. But there’s still stuff beyond just peacekeeping. Contract law, for example. Did you know that a two rank orb in contract law just generates more questions than it answers? I didn’t! But I do now!”*** James threw his arms into the air in frustration. “Also, you’re assuming entirely community-based legal situations, which doesn’t cover what we do when foreign powers start meddling with our society.” He pointed out. “And there’s still the big question to answer of ‘what is the ethical foundation of our law?’ Like, do we exist to protect the innocent? To protect the society? I sure as shit know we don’t want it to be punitive, because that hasn’t been working out for \*anyone\* in the real world. But being able to see bad examples operating in real time doesn’t actually answer the question of what the best answer is.”

132 momo + emerald computer chips + computers + totems = ritual = finding a person more likely dungeon

“So, you know how I can make totems out of the red orbs now?”

Anesh let out a questioning hum. “Ehhh, I know that you can make totems, but you can’t really target what information they give, can you?”

“Not really!” Momo agreed. “But we’ve kinda been collecting the things; no one wants to stockpile too many ranks of prudence or something stupid. So I’ve been tinkering with a \*lot\* of them.”

“Worrying. They cause brain damage in large numbers, don’t they?”

“Probably! Let me finish you jerk.” Momo glared at Anesh while James snickered slightly. “Anyway. \*No\*, a person can’t really process too many of them. \*But\*, it turns out, we’ve got a lot of these little things that can grow programs to our specifications. \*So\*, what I’ve been doing, is rigging up a system of computers that can process the totem data from, like, a lot of them. And then have one controller program that can sift through it all, and find things that don’t fit, or match specific search patterns. A very ramshackle panopticon, but eventually it shoooould work?”

“Well, I mean, we need a lot more of the emerald chips. And I’m not sure if it’ll be able to get too specific. Honestly I think the whole thing will be better for finding dungeons than finding… well, Alanna.”

In an effort to not get too sad about things again, James diverted. “So why call it a ritual if it’s just a bunch of computers running the world’s second most personally invasive form of Google?”

132 james = green orbs i think?

“I more meant finding magical bullshit answers, like how we can keep lettuce in our apartment for, like, a month now.”

James tilted his head back. “Nothing? Remember, oh god, like, a year ago? We got a green orb that just gave us a debuff to entropy. Apparently it does that.” He shook off the question and continued his original thought. “Anyway. The point is, there are obviously ways to make less food get wasted. But they all require people to change their lifestyles, or they’re bigger things like shipping, which are logistically expensive. None of them are \*impossible\*, though, and most of them aren’t actually hard at all. That’s what makes me so fucking angry, is that we \*could\* have solved all of this. Humanity, that is, not us individually.”

137 cat + momo + momo totem = 13 large cats over 30lbs nearby

Momo let out a noise that was best described as a defiant squeak. “I was busy!” She repeated. “I didn’t have time to change, I got caught in the middle of working on a totem when this happened.”

“Oh, what for?” Anesh shifted to curious professionalism, turning the conversational tone on a dime.

“Well, you remember the cat?”

“Ah, our fourth biggest mistake so far.”

“Fourth?” Momo paused, and then silently ticked off events on her fingers. “Yeah, okay. Well, I figured we should try to find it, so I was working on getting a red totem that can tell you how many large cats are within a certain radius. But then this happened, I had to rush the end, and I don’t think it’s giving accurate information.”

“That’s strange. I didn’t think they could do that.” Anesh held up an arm, signaling that he’d like some help standing, and Momo obliged him. “The totems always give accurate reports, even if the things they’re reporting on are… well…” He shrugged, putting a lot of synonyms for the word ‘dumb’ into the motion.

“Well, this one is telling me that there’s thirteen large cats within its radius. And that’s just not possible.”

Anesh paused, then slowly opened his mouth to ask, “How large is ‘large’?”

“Over thirty pounds, specifically. It was the best qualifier I could reliably produce.” Momo said, as if her ability to instinctively derive totem formula wasn’t already insanely impressive.

“Bloody hell.” Anesh muttered. “Do you think the displacer cat… multiplied?”

Momo rolled her eyes in that way that recovering teenage sarcasm addicts did. “That’d be stupid. How would it find a cat to mate with? The thing was…”

“I meant asexually, but sure.” Anesh waved away her train of thought. “Hm. Let’s crowdsource this.” He decided, and turned to address the dozen or so people in the dining room. “Hey! Does anyone know why there might be a dozen big cats nearby?”

137 clutter ascent -> bond sticks

“Oh, that reminds me!” Sarah cut James off abruptly, bouncing to her knees on the cushion she was lounging on and lunging forward to reach behind the curtain that they were hanging around. “Here!” She held out a small open cardboard box to James, and he glanced into it to see that it contained a series of engraved wooden sticks. All of them a little longer than your average pencil, and, he knew, mostly indestructible unless pulled on by two people. They were the objects from this dungeon’s idea of treasure chests, and when used, they formed a bond between the people that used them. A bond that could then be filled with an important moment, and used as a metaphysical shipping route to move traits and concepts between the two people.

138 momo controls her mass + blue orbs

“It’s fine, I can artificially decrease my mass if I need to!” Momo waved over her shoulder as she left the Response room, followed shortly afterwards by a slow stream of most of the rest of the briefing.

“Should we be concerned about that?” Anesh asked James as the two of them waited for the door to clear up.

“What, that Momo is absolutely being irresponsible with phenomenal cosmic power, or that she can reduce mass?”

“The mass thing.”

“Yes. But she said ‘her mass’, not ‘mass’, so it’s probably not as exploitable as we’d like. Though I \*am\* kinda curious as to where she got that.”

“Blue, probably.” Anesh shrugged. “A lot of those - I mean, somewhere around 80% a lot, I have the numbers - deal with telling physical laws to get bent. So it’s probably that.”

138 blue orbs = are they becoming aware + sarah stats they are cheating with orbs vs the karen conference thing

[+16 Activations : Close Object]

James made a facial expression halfway between a frown and a smile as the fresh blue orb sank into his wrist. He was sitting in his car in the parking lot of the high school, along with Sarah, Alex, and Texture-Of-Barkdust, everyone procrastinating going out into the dark grey rain between the vehicle and the building’s doors under the guise of preparing for battle.

“You know, I feel like the orbs are learning from us. And not in a good way.” James mentioned offhandedly.

“How so?” Sarah asked, zipping up the bag she was using as a magazine for wooden projectiles.

“Well,” James tapped his hands on the worn leather of the wheel, “it feels like all the ones I get now include the word ‘object’ where they wouldn’t before. Like, ‘close’ is way better than ‘close object’, right? I think they’re getting more limited.”

“I don’t think we were ever supposed to even know we could use them this way, though, right?” Alex asked. “I mean…” She paused briefly, shuddered, then continued like nothing was wrong. “I was plugged into Karen-Net for a long time, and I don’t remember most of it, but, I have this… idea ghost, I guess?... that what you’re doing with the orbs is sort of a cheat. Or a workaround, maybe.” She glanced out the window into the worsening rain. “Not that it’s bad or anything, just that we weren’t, like, expected.”

138 high school dungeon -> book -> alex -> Home Ec

“Home Ec!” Alex clapped her hands together, doing a little spin in the fading dust of the magical paperback that swirled around her. “That was way less dramatic than Alanna made it sound.”

138 high school dungeon -> book -> Texture-Of-Barkdus -> Social Studies = 1/100

Sarah was going to say something about how Alanna and James shared a propensity for that kind of dramatization, the use of almost mythical language to describe certain feelings of events. She was \*going\* to say that, but then a digital voice from below her waistline drew her attention. “Social Studies.” Texture-Of-Barkdust said, as the book she had flipped open with her fangs disintegrated. “Out of one hundred. Good. Normal.”

139 teleport pad = blue orb you get from it tested out + plus absorbing the orb

“Uh… I mean, you listen to the podcast now, so you should be fine? Momo, you literally attend operational briefings with me. The only thing I can even remotely think of that you might not be up to speed on is that we tested the blue you get for destroying a telepad”

“What’s it do?!” She perked up instantly.

“Fixes a flat tire, or something conceptually adjacent. Or manipulates asphalt if you absorb it.” James answered. “It’s very cool. But it doesn’t give many charges, and the telepads are just more useful anyway, so unless you want to build very middle of the road armor, it’s not that important. Now, fun as your distraction is, is there anything else you need?”

139 momo totem = suddenly understand the stock price of the bottom ten percent of businesses in the state

“Bullshit!” Momo accused him, pitching the rag in her hand across the room and into a bucket of sanitizer water. “You are \*stupidly\* good at this stuff. The last time I tried talking to you about totem design, I spent twenty minutes trying to half explain to you, half puzzle out, how and why a certain line made of cotton worked differently if it was made of polyester. And you listened, then nodded, \*once\*, said ‘okay, I get it’, and \*fixed the totem\* without even \*trying\*.”

“Really?” Nate asked, glancing up with a worried frown.

“I vaguely remember this. Didn’t my fixing the totem cause everyone in the building to suddenly understand the stock price of the bottom ten percent of businesses in the state, and then black out?” James didn’t react to the outburst, just calmly slicing melon.

Momo scowled at him. “I fixed it better. That’s not the point!”

139 order -> R&D -> full orange totem from dungeon = experiment

It was one of two that they possessed. Nikhail had led the team to collect it a couple nights ago, a few of Research’s human members and one of the new engineers braving the hallways of Officium Mundi to locate, and wholly extract a totem’s structure. They’d brought the orange they’d found, too. And, even better, none of them had gotten seriously hurt in the Penrose loop that the totem had tried to trap them in.

This was not the first test. They’d tested it already, from a safe distance. It worked. It took a snapshot of a designated relative position, and it extrapolated it out into a loop of right angles. Once you entered through the targeted position, you were stuck taking turns through the copied segments. This one wasn’t the most complicated iteration of this trap that Reed was aware of because you could break out of it by moving outward, but it was still powerful.

Because the copied space was \*real\*. Oh, sure, it was weird to access it, and there were some absurd limits to how it would have to be set up, but it made a \*mass copy\*. The only real downside was that it only copied a ‘structure’ - an intuitive heuristic that everyone kinda knew the definition of, but it was hard to agree on hard limits to. But that was fine, they hadn’t really started experimenting yet. They’d bug test that limit out.

This was the first experiment.

They’d unfolded the totem space inside the basement nineteen times now, opening and closing the zone to repeatedly test the limits and potential dangers. They had a fairly decent grasp on it now, as well as a harvest of concrete chunks and lightbulbs from inside the copied spaces before they were folded back up. Conservation of matter could get fucked, as far as Reed was concerned.

Now, it was time to see if they could modify it.

They’d made a full blueprint of both the totems in their possession. They’d gotten Anesh and Momo, with their unique takes on magic and the math thereof, to help generate models for the meanings of the lines and angles. That, along with examinations of a handful of other totems that hadn’t been brought out of the dungeon, meant that Research had a fairly decent educated guess on what they were doing.

139 order -> R&D -> full orange totem from dungeon = experiment

“Okay. Test one.” Reed said, as Taste-Of-Air puppeted the drone into place, orb held at just the right height to slide into the duel pyramid shape of the waiting empty totem. “We have added one two inch groove to the bottom left of panel six. This should either render the totem nonfunctional, or expand the copied area by six feet. Everyone ready?”

There was the feeling of falling. There was the memory of flying.

And then, something cracked.

It appeared in an instant, rioting out from where the totem should have taken a copy of local space. A jutting spike of nonspace, nowhere, cutting through the ceiling, blending the parking lot and a few trees overhead into a frozen whirlwind of matter and vectors.

The air howled as it was pulled in six directions at once, whipping into gale force wind down thin unseen tunnels in the open place overhead. Chunks of matter, mostly asphalt and dirt, spawned, sat stationary, then fired at high velocity to ricochet off the basement concrete floor. The drone was \*gone\*, shredded into toothpicks made of plastic and engine components. The nearby support pillar joined it shortly thereafter, a rain of concrete needles spraying the ceiling at four hundred miles an hour.

The event lasted for precisely twenty six seconds, before Reed crushed the orange orb in the center of the totem.

Space righted itself, the ceiling crumbled inward before stabilizing around the rough hole that led through the ground and out to the open night air. Like a hissing scream of relief, the problematic spire of warped reality undid its grip, and everything was suddenly normal again.

140 order -> R&D -> full orange totem from dungeon = experiment = THAT FAILED (long portion of chapter)

“It’s never mattered for the reds.” Momo rebutted. “Though…” She paused, before shrugging. “I mean, I guess I’ve never really tested that. But I would have noticed!”

“Yes, yes.” Davis agreed, nodding quickly. “You build them all at once, though. They’re… I suppose the best way to say it is ‘they are yours’. This one, though, was already made. And we tampered with it.”

“So, you think that if we rebuilt the totem, from scratch, exactly the same, that it would work as expected?”

“I don’t know.” Davis said bluntly. “But we should try. Methodically, and systematically. Because if I am right, it will save us years of trial and error. And if I am wrong, then-“

“Then another building explodes!” Momo yelled.

140 order -> R&D -> full orange totem from dungeon = experiment = THAT FAILED (long portion of chapter) = drone fault

“Uh… well, I don’t know about most of the magic stuff,” the kid started, looking really sheepish, “but what if it was the drone?”

James blinked, and glanced at Nikhail, who made a similar confused face. “The drone?” He asked.

“Well, yeah.” The student looked like they were falling apart under the scrutiny of actually being asked the question. “It’s… there was a weird feeling near the totem, for the first few tests, at first. But when we knew it was safe, we turned it on without the drone, and those went away. What if it thought the drone was part of the totem?”

Nikhail tapped the desk he was sitting at, before looking around at the rest of research. “Did anyone else feel anything weird for the first few tests?” He asked. Almost everyone raised their hand or said something. “Like your stomach dropping, right? But that went away after a few of them. I thought… shit, I thought we just got used to it.”

“If it was the drone…” Momo’s face went white. “We just stapled a whole extra chunk of white noise to the totem’s process. No wonder it blew up! Holy shit, it’s a miracle it didn’t blow up beforehand!”

140 james -> book -> biology

James paused the YouTube video he was watching as his cohorts in madness arrived. He was watching a thing about beetles, and while it wasn’t exactly what he wanted to be doing, it was useful, because it had been worth four points toward his biology Lesson. And he was pretty sure he could push that one over the edge tonight.

140 fredrick home -> attic -> dungeon -> bonding sticks

“Hey to you too.” Anesh said. “I have a thing, courtesy of Sarah.” He said, holding up one of Clutter Ascent’s bond sticks.

<| Connection Open : Anesh Patel - James Lyle : One Corridor Established : One Corridor Empty |>

The two of them hissed along with the rapid flare of light that marked a small circle on the backs of each of the right hands. This was the second one for both of them, Anesh sharing a connection with Alanna and James with Sarah. But the mental nudge they got when they cracked the stick didn’t mention those; so it must only count ones between the same set of people. Each of them independently wondered what would happen if you stacked connections between two close friends. They also wondered at what personal moment would activate the currently empty link between them, turning it into the world’s most powerful sharing tool.

“We’ll fill that in later.” James smirked at his boyfriend as he lightly elbowed his side, eliciting a riotous blush from him.

140 alex -> book -> home ec -> level up -> timing

“Yeah, that’s great.” Alex cut him off. “But I got my Lesson leveled up!”

“Oh, rad!” James grinned as her enthusiasm bled into the group. “That’ll probably be useful for this. What’d you get from it? It was home ec, right?”

Alex nodded, and motioned to the apron. “Yeah, hence the… well, whatever. I got Timing. It’s kinda cool, because it’s, like, very dramatic how obvious it is when I need to use it? It’s not just guessing what time it is or how long something’s been in the oven, it’s also how long things \*should\* be in the oven, even if I shouldn’t know that. It’s cool, even if it’s not exactly for a fight, you know?”

140 james -> books -> basket ball + biology

Though he did have youtube videos about deep sea life up on his other monitor. So not one hundred percent a break. But it wasn’t like he was listening to them with much focus, if his Lesson was to be believed.

[Lesson Continues : Biology 188/200

Lesson Continues : Basketball 71/1200]

140 high school dungeon -> books -> 2 or more = higher requirement lessons

One worrying thing, which Sarah had confirmed for him when she’d stacked a second skill book from the school as well, was that the second lesson started out with a requirement twice what the first had. James had hoped he’d been misremembering things; something that he didn’t worry about as much anymore. But no, the threshold rose. Which was a real problem, and suddenly made it clear how the Akashic Sewer was ‘cheating’.

They knew Officium Mundi cheated, in a way. Well, they called it cheating, but it was really more of a real-world example of a balancing mechanic. So many skills were just useless. There were a billion rewards, and only three useful ones. The Sewer, it seemed, was going a different direction. The rewards were powerful, but there was a soft cap on them. By your third or fourth Lesson, you’d be needing to be taking 300-level college courses just to put a dent in the requirements.

142 james -> books -> biology -> upgraded -> endurance

There was nothing like that in the option presented to him.

“Choose!” The baleful sharp thing screamed at him again. “Students shall cease stalling!” It slammed a bladed scythe that had the markings of a perfect meter on it into the blackboard, hewing a line underneath the three options written there.

James had finished his biology Lesson.

The strange figure in this place was difficult to focus on. It was the shape of a person, but it was all teeth and malice. James knew he wouldn’t remember a lot of this mental place when he left, just the choice he was offered, but he still couldn’t help but try to see the thing for what it was.

“Endurance.” James said, mildly regretful that he hadn’t said Instinct, no matter how little he trusted that skill.

The thing sighed, a noise like several metal chairs being scraped across the floor. James smirked a little at the obvious relief the overtly hostile monster was feeling. And then, the thing flicked a bladed hand, and the filthy classroom pivoted around James, walls sliding until he found his desk sitting just outside the classroom’s door.

Then the door slammed shut, and James woke up.

142 momo + totems + dungeon computers + emerald chips / grow programs = momo created AI

Momo had built, mostly out of parts salvaged from Officium Mundi, a network of computers.

Then, feeling ambitious, she’d started using the emerald chips they had to grow programs that could read the output of the red orb totems that she’d gradually been learning to build and fine tune.

Worth noting that the ones she couldn’t fine tune made pretty good weapons; equivalent to memetic flashbangs, really.

The chips had been useful, and had worked, too, which was a little worrying. But Momo wasn’t here for philosophy, she was here for \*results\*! So she’d asked for some help, learned some programming both through magic and wisdom coffee and also sort of the normal way, and started to build a database that could interpret the red totem signals, collate the data, and compare it against recorded statistics from the internet. Then, it looked for deviations, and reported on the glaringly obvious ones.

It kiiiind of worked.

It didn’t really accomplish anything, though.

And now, she returned to a monitor with a blinking message on it.

“Is anyone there?”

Momo looked around the room that she’d redecorated with cables, computer screens and lava lamps. Most of the monitors were off, but the one in the middle of the room was glowing in the colorful light of her workspace. A simple white-on-black line of text displayed on it.

“Reed?” Momo called out into the room that contained no people but herself. “Nik? Is this a prank?” She glanced back at the closed door to the hallway. “If this is a prank, I’m gonna rig your chair to detonate chocolate pudding into your ass next time you sit down.”

“Hello?!” The monitor changed words, fans in the many computer towers on and under the desk beginning to hum a hair louder than before. “Hello?”

“Fuck.” Momo muttered under her breath. “Can you hear me?” She asked.

Nothing. Of course not, she hadn’t put a microphone anywhere in here. “Can you read this?” She typed onto the keyboard. But there was no response to that either.

Finally, fumbling through loose cords and tools on her workstation, she found a pad of paper that wouldn’t teleport her anywhere when used. Uncapping a sharpie, she scrawled large words on it, and then held it up to the webcam sitting on top of the central screen.

If this \*was\* a prank, this was a good way to dispel it.

“Can you see me?” She wrote.

The text on the screen vanished. And then, a second later, replaced itself. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Hello. Who are you? Who am I? What is happening? Hello? Are you there?”

“Uh ooohhhh.” Momo breathed out. “I have made a mistake. And an AI. Good. Good good good. This is… great. Oh god, James is gonna be \*dad disappointed\* in me, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” It replied. Followed by a replacement to the question of “What am I?”

Plucking the webcam off the top of the computer, Momo shifted the cord to the most length she could get out of the hardware, and turned it around, panning the camera across the construction of hard and software that she’d accidentally grown something alive in.

“I am this.” It stated, showing a repeat of several frames of the footage of its body. “Am I also this?” It showed a picture from another part of the Lair, from one of the other connected webcams, a frame of another computer.

Momo, eventually, on the cardboard back of her now-empty notepad, informed the AI that she needed to go get more paper. And also tell some of the others about this. And, reassuringly, it didn’t try to keep itself secret or stop her leaving. It seemed \*impatient\*, but not angry or conspiratorial.

“I made an AI in the basement and I need some cash for a wireless webcam.” Momo retaliated with a mock glare, cheeks still bright red.

143 Ethan + Mark + Bill + Tyrone + Dave = high school dungeon -> same book to all 5 = drama 0/100

“Okay, here’s the deal.” James spoke to a group of five delvers, some new, some old. Anesh had found him a minute ago, presumably prompted by Sarah, and had gotten James to down a half-thermos of the mental sharpening coffee he’d brought. It had left him feeling way more capable of taking on the dungeon, and interacting with other humans, even if it didn’t entirely kill the physical symptoms of his depression like the light not being right or the coffee tasting like cough syrup. “We’re testing this out, and you’re our first group. Don’t grimace at me, Ethan, we already know it’s safe!”

“You’re a test group \*for the program\*, not for the magic itself!” James bit back. “So. When you open and read these books, you’re going to start a Lesson from one of the other dungeons. It’ll be an academic topic, and you’re expected to learn about it. Fill up the bar, and you get a bonus, okay?” Nods from everyone, even Ethan. “Now here’s the thing. These copies, they work like copied orbs. They give you the same Lesson. And I mean \*literally the same Lesson\*. You’re all going to have to learn the same hundred points of knowledge to progress, got it? That means, most likely, that you’ll want to schedule a time to meet up somewhere and have a study group. Is everyone gonna be okay with that, or does anyone need to find a replacement?”

The five selected delvers shook their heads eagerly. Every one of them had a slightly different look of excitement on their face. For Ethan, it was something bordering on hero worship. For Mark and Bill, the older blue collar workers had a look that was more about just being happy to be part of something. Though that look from them might also just be awe at the dungeon they’d been invited into for the first time. Tyrone looked excited to be back in the magic saddle after months dealing with some family thing out of state. And Dave just looked like he was thrilled to be getting a textbook, finally.

Either way, no one objected.

Thirty seconds later, the first official study group of the Order had a shared Lesson in [Drama : 0/100].

143 orbs general over all

“The main difference,” Momo had said, “is that the dungeon \*owns\* green orb Life. As long as, you know, it’s here. It seems to not work outside, since the camracondas are cool in the Lair.”

“Wait, they’re green?” Daniel asked, eyebrows up.

“Oh yeah, absolutely.” Momo nodded. “We’re not really sure what the variations in life-types actually are, though, right James?” She waited for an answering nod before continuing. “Yellows act like, well… wildlife. Greens are the agents of the dungeon, but \*sometimes\* they leave the dungeon, and keep working for it. We’re pretty sure things like the iLipedes are red life, but we haven’t actually killed any so we don’t know, and I’m not about to either! Those things are nice. Oh, and then informorphs, which are purple. Right Path?” Momo elbowed the space around Daniel in a friendly way.

143 paper pushers + orbs = orbs have names attached

The dungeon \*probably\* made orbs, somehow. Life in here, almost certainly, made more life. Striders often had that kind of look like they’d been put together a little haphazardly. It was entirely possible their nests were all started by one strider with a pile of orbs, a desire for family, and some determination. No one had ever witnessed it directly, but they all knew that yellow life could make more yellow life. After all, Rufus had made Ganesh, so long ago.

“Yeah, the paper pusher thing confuses the shit out of me.” James admitted. “Like, do the green ones make subservient yellow ones? Or are they both just made for different reasons? And what determines it?” He shrugged. “The green ones seem to be able to take over other dungeon life they come across; they always whip up strider swarms around them.”

“Maybe it’s a promotion?” Daniel asked.

“What?”

“Like, the yellow ones get promoted to managers. And then they become green orbs?” He sheepishly suggested. “I mean, a lot of stuff here doesn’t map perfectly to actually working in an office, but, like.. these things are shaped like employees?”

“Huh.” James made a motion somewhere between a nod and a shrug. “I mean, it’s the best theory so far!” He said. “It’s probably something way more sinister, though. Oh! Here’s a fucking weird thing! These guys all have names!”

Momo jerked back, dropping the orb she’d been doing basketball tricks with. “Wait, what?” She asked, letting it fall into their cart.

“Oh yeah! We’ve scanned a dozen or so of them with an iLipede. The paper pusher orbs always read as people’s names.” James let out a long breath of air. “Man, the first time that happened, I actually threw up? The names are apparently random though. They don’t map to anyone who’s actually gone missing or died, even though coincidence is gonna make at least one name line up sometimes.”

144 order -> green orbs = 5th basement + 2 crawl spaces

“Okay, the first thing you need to know is that there’s something wrong with the Status Quo gear.” Reed told James as he stepped off the elevator to their basement.

Their fifth basement.

They’d found the limits of that particular orb. Five basements before it began to have diminishing returns. Which translated to “and then two crawlspaces”. And then an access panel. At that point, they ran out of copies of the orb to use, which was probably for the best anyway. James had netted a total of five and a fifth ranks in horseback riding from the whole thing, the rapidly diminishing returns on the skill ranks mirroring the quick decline on the quality of subterranean spaces pretty well.

Test to destruction. Find the limits. Then abuse those limits.

145 fredrick home -> attic dungeon -> bond sticks

“Can I just say,” Anesh cut in as he stood and closed his laptop, preparing to head back to one of the basements, “that it’s kinda weird being in a group where someone literally almost died, and we’re more worried about the feelings of JP than the potential murder victim?”

“Ah, whatever.” James flipped a hand with casual grace as he also stood up from his chair. “I’m fine, and you comforted me enough last night.”

Sarah’s eyes sparkled. “Oh \*really\*?!” She leaned in with an expression that demanded juicy details. James and Anesh, having a quick hug before one partner left, both looked at her, then rolled their heads away so they could face the other direction while the blush spread across their collective faces.

<| Corridor Filled : Bond Formed - Embarrassment : Share - Speed : Vector - Eyesight : One Corridor Established : Zero Corridors Empty |>

“\*That\* does it?!” James burst out suddenly as the second circular marking on the back of his hand flared with a brief pink and red glow before reshaping itself slightly. Anesh’s matching mark doing something very similar, if not the same. “Months of searching for Alanna together, a half dozen delves, fighting Officium assassins in parking garages, a million tiny things that make me love you, \*lots\* of sex, and \*this\* is the fucking thing that unlocks the Attic link?!” James hammered his knuckles into the unyielding surface of the table, rattling the dishes still on it. “No! This will not stand! I refuse to be embarrassed into being magical!”

“Sooooo, the syntax on that changed.” Anesh casually acted like James wasn’t in the middle of passive-aggressively ranting at the dungeon magic. “It looks like it dropped the numbers and just straight up lets us share a thing now. Did you feel anything change with your bond with James?” He asked Sarah.

145 orange orbs

“And finally, due to a completely harmless accident in Research,” she absolutely needed to frontload that qualifiying statement, “there’s a new orange orb absorption available!”

Sarah gave a grateful nod to the intern helping her run the sound board as she passed Sarah a tablet screen with the reminder information on it. “If you’d forgotten, because we barely ever find them, the orange orbs warp space, give licenses when cracked, and when absorbed, give you a job. Well that’s nice! I don’t have enough jobs!” Her intern let out a surprised laugh that was just audible enough to be picked up by the mic, and Sarah smiled. They’d leave that in the edit. “Info on absorbing is in the manual, obviously, and you can requisition a copy of the orb if you want to, but remember that so far, as far as we know - my favorite phrase! - you can only absorb one and you can’t ever change it.”

She paused to double check the line that the intern had handed her. “Really?” She asked, facing slightly away from the mic. The other girl just shrugged at her, curiosity and excitement in her eyes. “Alright, I guess!” Sarah turned back to record cleaner audio. “This one asks you to pull a hundred and twenty six weeds - and as with all of these there’s probably some kind of pedantically specific definition on that but whatever - and if you do, it generates an \*eight ounce cube of diamond\* and this cannot be right.”

Sarah paused, then she giggled. “Ah, whatever. Of course it’s right. Well! I look forward to everyone getting really into gardening!”

145 momo totem -> totem as caller ID that also gives address

“...How did you know it was me?” El asked, sounding legitimately shaken. “How do people keep doing that?!”

“Oh, I have a totem that lets me sense inbound phone calls. I’ve been figuring out how to dial it down to a really small radius so it’s basically just perfectly useful caller ID. It also gives me an address if it’s from a business, so I can order surgical strikes against phone scammers.” Momo sounded weirdly distracted for someone talking about solving one of the three great problems facing modern civilization. “So. You wanna come back, or what?”

146 order (oregon) -> half of parking lot is missing + blue orb [+24 Activations - Manipulate Asphalt] + blue orbs do not diminish when absorb same power

“James a chunk of the parking lot is missing.” Anesh looked at their project, squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them again. Yup. Still there. “James you stole a chunk of the parking lot.”

James didn’t even have the good grace to look sheepish. “Is the parking lot \*really\* that important?” He asked. Rhetorically.

In front of them, dominating the warehouse space, was what had started the day as a pile of plundered asphalt.

Over the last twenty hours, working with input from what felt like half the Order in some way, James and Momo had taken chunks of asphalt stolen from the parking lot above, as well as from a few construction sites around the city’s road network, and abused the hell out of the blue orb from the telepads.

[+24 Activations - Manipulate Asphalt]

Blue orbs, it turned out, did not have diminishing returns when absorbed, if you’d already used up the original power. You got the exact same power, again, at the same strength.

146 asphalt -> mech (see above)

Beginning with a rough outline and an end goal, and slowly incorporating more outside help and actual planning as they went along, the growing team had turned disparate chunks of rough black material into a humanoid shape. It stood twenty five feet tall, and didn’t look remotely human in its proportions. Legs that were too thick and short compared to arms that were far too long and perfectly smooth. No need for muscle definition when you weren’t planning to use muscles.

James laughed. “Well, I gave you the joke answer. The real answer is, carry capacity. Because I am \*pretty sure\* that, if we do this right? We can use this with a telepad to move heavy cargo. Fast.”

146 orbs = asphalt mech

**A blue orb from someone with a handful of charges left that shifted an object to being frictionless. They’d reshaped the ‘joints’ of their creation into perfectly, literally perfectly, smooth spheres**. And from there, using manipulate asphalt to control the limbs of their project became infinitely easier.

To prevent that snapping, **a reinforced rebar frame, with tungsten rods summoned from an orange job making up the fine ‘bones’ of the massive fingers.**

146 fredric -> home -> attic -> dungeon -> bond sticks

Some people had triggered their bonds, gained from the Clutter Ascent sticks. It wasn’t just James and Anesh; the templating had changed on all of them. James and Anesh took the time to test their sharing of speed, too, and found that it thankfully wouldn’t kill them if they used it in a car. It was \*their\* speed, not the car’s speed. And it was kind of a silly definition of the word, too. They could dial it up or down, how much they were pouring into the other person, and it basically just made the partner faster. Or slower. You \*could\* take, instead of give, without asking. The bonds were a massive trust exercise. Especially since no one knew if they could ‘break’. The other people who’d gotten bonds could share vision, and rhetoric, and both of those were really fun to see in action.

146 highschool dungeon -> books -> (5 people with drama i think) = leveled up

Also, the Order’s first improvised theater group had made their first collective level up. They all had a vague impression of having to choose together, and needing to reach a consensus about their choice before it stuck. They were all now one point higher up on ‘motivation’. And it showed. Dramatically. Pun mostly not intended.

151 endurance = ((((i think high school -> dungeon = endurance of one of the books james has))))

“Okay, so, what exactly does your point in endurance \*do\*?” Anesh glowered at his partner. “Because I feel like even you don’t actually know.”

James sheepishly grinned as he sat on the edge of the driver’s seat and shook sand and pebbles out of his boot. “Guilty.” He admitted. “Though, I’m pretty sure that whatever it’s doing, it’s having some kind of amplificitve effect with some of the purple upgrades I have. Like… okay, I clot faster, right? But ever since getting endurance, I clot almost \*instantly\*. I don’t think I can actually bleed out, it’s kinda rad.” James slid his boot back on, oblivious to the narrow eyed frown Anesh was giving him.

“Amplificitive is… were you trying to say multiplicative? Or amplifying?”

“Yes. And I got confused midway through.”

150 EL road dungeon -> magic iron gear -> 3 points of fuel in james now. + maps / brochures

El ignored James. “So hey, before we go, touch this with me.” She held out the strange humming gear from earlier. “I figure… I guess I figure that we should share it now. So I’m not tempted later, you know?”

“Sure.” James shrugged and reached out to settle his fingers against the surface of the gear. Next to him, Anesh did the same. It was thick metal, not marred by rust or burrs, but it still felt \*old\*. “What are we supposed to do?” James asked.

El made a half shrug as she held the gear by its center with her other arm extended. “Just think about, um, moving?” The girl kicked the ground like an angry child. “Fuck, man, I dunno. You’re the one who’s good with words. It’s magic. Eat it with your mind or some shit.”

“Eloquent.” James snarked, but smothered the grin when he saw that El really was kind of self conscious about this. “Okay.”

He focused on moving. On the feeling of going forward. He let his brain adapt to the vibration of the gear; it was the hum of the road, he realized, so James fell into that vibe. He and Anesh didn’t need to be hooked up to each other for their minds to go to the same place on this; they’d had a lot of experience putting themselves in mindsets needed to exploit dungeon goodies.

A second later, the gear was gone. Their hands were stretched out touching nothing but a ripple of motion, quickly fading away.

This time, there were no words. Not in the same way as the Office or the Sewer. Instead, there was a feeling in his chest, of a space where motion could go, if it needed to. Where momentum could be stockpiled for the future need.

It wasn’t exactly a mana pool, as James understood it. But he \*could\* clearly feel what it did, if not what it was for. He could also feel how much it could hold.

Three. It could hold three.

Three what? Unclear. Three something. Three units of velocity, he supposed. And he could already feel it ticking up. If James focused, \*really\* focused, slipped down into the kind of dream meditation he’d begun learning back at the start, then he could see it ticking up as he moved. Fractions of fractions of fractions. If it made it to a whole number, it would be so much easier to feel the increment, James instinctively knew. But for now, it was just sitting there. **Zero of three. Waiting to be filled up and used for some magic he hadn’t found yet.**

**He opened his eyes. “Neat!” He proclaimed. “What’s it \*do\*?”**

**“It’s fuel.” El shrugged. “Obviously. Can’t explain much, though you know what all my spells are. That said, completely unrelated, hang onto the map scraps. I’ve got a shoebox full of them under my bed, we can compare them later.”**

150 EL road dungeon -> car parts -> points =

“Hey! How much velocity do you have?” He called over.

“Twenty nine!” El yelled back. And then, slamming her door shut, she kicked the car out of idle and executed a trecherous looking U-turn to accelerate down the freeway back toward her home town.

“I have a problem with that.” Anesh said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Twenty nine?”

“Run the numbers for me, I’m tired.”

“Assuming it was a split of the artifact’s magic that we just did, that one gear was worth nine-ish points, right?” Anesh posited, and James nodded along. “Okay. So, how long did El know about this place? A year? And the door isn’t time locked. She has gotten four of those cogs, counting this one. She has \*three spells\*. But she seemed to know how the parking structures worked pretty closely.”

151 purple orb = making a connection to

Under his breath, staring at the lightly glimmering purple orb in his fingers, he muttered. “Congress shall make no law, prohibiting or abridging the freedom of speech, of the press, or of the people to gather.” The first amendment of the Bill of Rights. James might disagree with a huge amount of the power structures of the world, but those centuries old words still resonated with him.

And with the orb, too.

He could feel it, suddenly. A connection, sitting there, nascent in its formation, but ready to spark to life. And suddenly, James knew. It was exactly like absorbing a blue or yellow, but he could \*push\*, if he chose to. Apply it outward, send it to another. The orb was primed for it. All it would take would be the mental command.

152 orb cancer removal records

Order of Endless Rooms, Research Division Records

Abstract and Summary of Cancer Removal Orb, Test Run 3

Abstract : It is incredibly useful, when working with magic, to know up front that what we are testing does something. Whether or not it works is not in question. The question is, what exactly does it do, does it differ from person to person, and can it do what we want it to in the worst of circumstances.

This round of experiments seeks to test the definition of ‘cancer’ as used by Orb P-29. With assistance in finding subjects for clinical trials from Dr. Nikita and the radiology department of Providence Hospital, twenty two individuals were selected to receive treatment. Normally, a control group would be designated to receive a placebo. That isn’t exactly an option here, nor is it what we are testing for. Again, efficacy is not in question, only limits and definitions. So, ten subjects currently suffer from stage one skin cancer, while the other ten all have no diagnosed malignant tumors, but do have benign melanoma. Two additional subjects possess both benign and malignant cancer cells.

Trials will take place with patients under close observation during activation.

Due to the one year period between activations, the full scope of this trial will take time to evaluate, but initial results will give us a window into how far we can rely on the orbs to do our job for us.

Summary of Results :

Results for subjects with malignant cells was immediate and visible. As has been noted in previous tests, matter is seemingly removed from reality altogether, with flesh and blood vessels repairing themselves around the damage, but not filling the missing space immediately. (Concerns about this have been brought up in both previous tests regarding long term health, and do require further study. Patients in this trial do not appear to be at risk, but will stay under infrequent observation for the next several years.)

Results for subjects with benign growths were negative. Subject weights also remained entirely unchanged even when using the orb (exception, one patient shifted weight which caused unreliable results). This points to a complete lack of triggering of the effect.

It is still unknown at what threshold Orb P-29 designates a growth as ‘cancer’, but this does highlight at least that our next round of tests should be to determine that fact. The reality that there is no shortage of willing test subjects is a sad truth.

The final group, which was more difficult to find local participants for, experienced loss of mass in both benign and malignant cells. Again, further testing is required and we may need to cast a more public net to find subjects of the right category, but Dr. Nikita’s working hypothesis is that once a specific cancer is targeted, it is destroyed thoroughly. If this can be proven as true, then it is a best case scenario in terms of actually eliminating the cancer entirely and not simply putting a patient into remission.

Even still, this test does indicate that Orb P-29 is operating with a real world heuristic on the nature of what cancer is, and what it means to remove one.

Concerns :

There is no easy way to test to see exactly when the effect triggers on a subject. Metastasis obviously needs to be present and have reached a certain threshold, but the actual limits of that threshold are unknown, and without large scale testing and access to practical time dilation, there is no feasible way to understand the limits.

Trigger conditions do not map to accepted medical labeling in regards to the mass required before a growth is labeled a tumor. Either the effect is not using common medical definitions, or it is affecting undetected cancer within each subject.

The one year cooldown timer has not been confirmed on its operation, and will not be until at least two years from present testing.

Attachments :

Body mass before/after (Chart)

Patient medical files (Personal information redacted)

153 james + asphalt (something)

But James didn’t listen. He had her attention. And as he grabbed onto the power inside him, he also crouched down and made contact with the asphalt. And then, he took control of it.

There were a few schools of thought on using the blue orbs’ absorption powers. Different people in the Order all had different ideas on what the best way to make use of them actually was. For some, it was a straightforward thing; the orbs did something, and you could do that thing.

But they were unimaginative. Some people thought that physical contact with your target made it easier, some people found motions helped guide the powers - especially the manipulation ones - and other members believed that every use was an exchange and by offering more of your own health, you could get more done. The one thing they all seemed to agree on was that the effects molded to thoughts. And so, focus, and creativity, and the ability to truly picture what you wanted, helped.

All of them were probably partially right. But the Order had some stuff going on, so they hadn’t tested anything.

James wasn’t great at visualizing what he was after. But thanks to multiple purple orb enhancements, keeping his brain focused on a task wasn’t that hard.

The asphalt under his fingers shifted. It didn’t liquify, but it flowed like water. Mentally, he marked out a circle around him, and sliced a thin line through it, separating the local asphalt from the rest of the road - again, they didn’t know if it helped, but James figured if he had to pull on less matter it would be easier - and then, standing up, he brought two twisting spirals of pavement with him under the palms of his hands.

He pivoted, using his hand as a guiding point for where he wanted the material to move, and with the burning charge of the blue power still active, it obeyed. James moved his arm in a loop, and then again at the elbow, pulling a streamer of pavement up into a large spiral, suspended in the air at heat height by a pair of thin struts still connected to the ground. With his other hand, he simply pulled up and tried to envision the black material blooming like a flower. It half worked, but the arrangement of alien spikes coming out in a ball on top of the spire wasn’t like any flower found on Earth.

And then the charge ended, and James was left standing at the end of a driveway with his rapidly assembled art installation and piece of evidence.

“\*Magic\*.” He stated simply. “Now can everyone calm the hell down?” James asked in an irritated tone.

153 EL + shoe box (maps?) + EL infomorph + james + purple orb creating a infomorph

“Here.” She said, shuffling backward out from under a closet shelf before popping back up on her knees, twisting her torso around to toss a shoebox onto her bed. The box impacted a half empty gallon jug of raspberry iced tea, and slid to the floor, but the lid didn’t pop off and James politely set it back on a more topographically stable part of the blankets without comment. “Okay. Do the voodoo on me so I can explain this shit.”

“\*Second of all\*.” James continued unabated. “We actually need to talk about what it means to implant an infomorph in a person.”

El sighed, and threw herself onto one of the few clear parts of her bed, flopping with a dramatic thud, boots hitting on the hardwood floor. “Alright, whatever. Is this gonna be about how I have to be ‘responsible’ and ‘ethical’ and stuff?”

“Yeah, actually.” A bite of anger entered James’ voice. “It is. Because you do. El, I’m not gonna fucking leave you with a living creature in your care if you’re going to treat it like a tool. And if you keep acting like that, I honestly am gonna stop giving a single fuck about your current predicament.” James glared at her, not flinching away from El raising one arm off the bed to flip him off. “As of now, Anesh and I are here as advanced scouts to determine if your \*entire town is being eaten alive\*. It doesn’t matter how much magic or insider info you can offer us, you are not that important. So if you want help, maybe act like a goddamn adult, and not an angry teenager.”

“Yeah, okay.” She said. “I don’t wanna be that jerk. What do I need to know?”

The tension eased. “Okay.” James stopped subconsciously gritting his teeth. “Three things. First off, a nascent infomorph isn’t alive. I’ll do exactly what it’s meant to do, and basically nothing else. If you let it, then it will just fade away after a month or two, never having been alive. I’m aware this might sound hypocritical, but until that point, it \*is\* a tool. The thing here is, this one is going to eat the other one in your head, if it wins. And it’ll live longer, and it \*might\* become a person. What happens then is kind of up to you. You’ll experience it, in flashes of feelings and dreams. And if you push yourself, and figure out what language it’s speaking, you can make contact.”

“And then?” El asked. She’d pulled her legs up, sitting half off her bed, hands holding her boots by the toes. SItting like a student, listening and absorbing.

“And then, you can talk. And help them grow. Into whoever they’ll be.” Anesh commented from his place leaning on the doorframe. “There’s a few infomorphs in the Order. They like us, for some reason.”

“No, you fuckhole. The thing about them moving out. They can do that?” She threw a pillow at him, hard enough to know she meant it, but not so fast that James didn’t duck to the side and snatch it out of the air before it slammed into one of her empty easels.

“Yeah. Eventually, they’ll be strong enough to do that. It’ll be between you two. That’s how relationships work, El.” He said, almost sadly. “Now, ready?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Hit me.”

James nodded, and pulled the orb out, holding it up in the light between his thumb and first two fingers. He took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of bacon still wafting from downstairs and the excessive number of paint tubes El had scattered across her floor.

It wasn’t hard to dip back into the mindset. The words were still there, and it wasn’t like using a blue or absorbing any of the orbs. Some of the power effects from Officium Mundi needed emotions, a feeling, a \*vibe\*. Some things, like the totems, needed strict adherence to geometric rules. And some things, well…

Sometimes you just had to know what to say.

“No interference with freedom of communication.” James spoke. Paraphrasing, perhaps, but capturing the essence of a document that had been around since before he was born.

The orb turned in his hand, shifting from a solid object to a starfield of potential. And with a small mental nudge, flipping a switch that had always been there but he hadn’t been able to see, James shoved it forward, toward El.

The distortion in the air slipped into the girl sitting on the bed without any kind of fanfare or obstacle. That was just how these infomorphs were; you either got out of the way, or they got in your head. Humans just didn’t have a natural defense against them.

“Now what?” El asked.

“Now nothing. It either works, or it doesn’t.” James said. “We’ve got a lot more purple orbs in the trunk, though. So if it works at all, we can just bury the thing in attempts and go from there.”

153 EL + shoe box (maps?) = spells when map gets complete? = EL still has infomorph in her ?!?!?!?

“Very Stalingrad.” Anesh added. “Try it out. What’s in the box?” He inclined his head toward the shoebox on the bed.

“Oh, map scraps from the dungeon.” El said easily. “If we’re lucky, one of the ones you two have will line up to something in here.” She popped the lid off, revealing an inch thick layer of assorted scraps of paper.

James didn’t let anything show on his face as he said, “Why’s that? Some kind of reward?”

“Yup. It’s where spells come from.” El nodded. Then, she froze mid nod, and looked down at her hands. “Oh shit.” She said. “That worked fast. Holy crap. It worked! Yes!” She hopped off the bed, throwing a punch at an invisible target. “Take that, you fucking brain worm! Haha! Yes! Now, time for wizard shit! You got your map chunks?”

James couldn’t help but share an empathetic laugh, letting El’s enthusiasms for her abruptly loosened tongue get to him. “Yeah, yeah. So, how do we split these?”

“Oh, easy. Whoever found the newest one gets it.” El gave an easy shrug. “It’s fair, and it balances out over time. And it’s just a good rule.”

James and Anesh both went quiet, and shared a look between themselves that went unnoticed by El. The question, shared with sad quirks of eyebrows, was ‘and how would you know it was a rule, without someone to make rules with’.

155 james + map pieces got together = spell -> Maker’s Hand Upon The Wheel

James sighed as he picked up one of the last bits of old hiking map. “Nah. I don’t even know what this one is a map \*of\*, so I’m just tapping them together and trying to…”

If he’d still had a physical body, in this outside space, he would have given a full body sigh with enough emphasis to make his high school drama teacher applaud. But he didn’t, and so couldn’t, and so just observed.

Below him, rotating, over and over, was a pure black sphere. It rolled in the void, somehow darker than the nothingness around him. It was a \*real\* blackness, not simply the absence of anything. Except, except…

The ball wasn’t completely dark. There, turning near its base, was a tiny dot of \*something\*. He tried to focus, and the ball slowed its turning. In the thick inky nothingness, James’ view focused in, closer and closer to that one spot. It glowed, to his nowhere perception. A kind of mental beacon that it had not yet been acknowledged properly. He approached closer, and closer still, until he couldn’t even tell what he was looking at was part of a ball. It was a sweeping curved plane, and then just an overhead view of the empty material. And right in the middle, a little speck of the space was filled in, by a road map of six square blocks of a small city in the mountains, connected to a strip of map outlining a series of hiking trails somewhere in South America.

And as soon as his mind focused on it with that context, he felt something flowing through his veins, burning into his bones. A rattling electricity that surged across his skin and told him that he needed to \*go\*. It was, he instinctively understood, the Velocity that he’d built up in that hidden space inside himself. But now, unleashed. Given a channel to the outside world through this window of map on the darkened globe. And then, he \*knew\*. Knew how to activate it, what it did, what it cost, everything. And most importantly, he knew its name.

James blinked, sitting in El’s bedroom, the wispy ash of two small pieces of paper floating away from his face, and a set of words on the tip of his tongue.

Maker’s Hand Upon The Wheel.

He reached out his hand, opening his mouth, and caught a pillow in the face that sent him reeling back, sputtering. “Why?!” James demanded of El as he blocked the second incoming pillow.

Anesh shoved the map shard back in his pocket and took James’ hand up. “Yup. You were out for seven minutes, by the way.” He said, checking his phone. “I filled El in on the kid. She’s gonna keep an eye on them today while we go investigate dungeon crimes.”

“Not even a little bit.” He replied. “It improves fine control, relative to my current speed.” James paused as they got to their car and cracked the doors, waiting for the interior oven heat that had built up in the sun to fade a bit. “And to be clear, that’s ‘speed’ as in ‘how fast I am travelling’, not the abstract thing that we can share. Unless I’m using it to move. I am explaining this badly.”

“I think I get it.” Anesh said. “So, control in terms of, letting you react at appropriate speeds while driving over a hundred miles an hour? Or control in terms of, being able to draw perfect circles or something?”

159 manipulate asphalt = no go on claimed territory of another

“\*Anyway\*.” James continued without letting anyone else interrupt. “We’ve still got manipulate asphalt charges left. That’s kind of a big gun, let’s use that.”

Anesh winced. “Bad news.” His boyfriend said. “I tried it earlier, and whether its the Route Predation or the Mechanic, it doesn’t much matter; any asphalt on claimed territory snaps out of our control almost right away.”

159 EL road dungeon -> full map piece -> Maker’s Hand Upon The Wheel (james)

“Great.” James closed his eyes, and pulled on the refreshed stockpile of asphalt manipulation charges. Around them, the road bubbled, rose into the air on tenuous tendrils, and roughly stabilized into an oblong shape hovering next to their vehicle. With a wordless command, Maker’s Hand Upon The Wheel activated, and suddenly, James could feel every granule of stone in the mass he had taken command of, every edge and contour. The blob of asphalt steadied, locked itself in place just outside his window, and peeled back scintillating layers as it formed itself into a single vicious black needle. His velocity began to tick down. But he had, with everything at his command, complete control over this one chunk of matter.

160 EL road dungeon -> EL -> spell -> An Engine Hums Eternal

Velocity. El gave a terrified, wild grin to herself. She had some of that too, and one thing specifically for being chased by hostile high speed assholes. “An Engine Hums Eternal”. She muttered, and that invisible, thrumming power seeped out of her chest, and into the frame of the very nature of the car around her.

Then they were going a hundred miles an hour, their speed doubled in a heartbeat, leaving the pursuit behind in a flash. If she’d done it by pressing down the gas pedal, El would be dead as soon as the road took a moderately sharp curve in two seconds; but she’d done it with magic, and it didn’t just amp up her speed, but also gave her car the handling to manage it.

162 orange totems

Davis cleared his throat, reading something out of the corner of his eye that Planner showed to him. “Yes. Okay, so, good news, we’ve got three fairly basic orange totem patterns down \*solid\*. We can do Penrose hallways, folded doors, and best of all, a standard ‘bigger on the inside’ space. Uh… folded doors are the thing where we can make the same door lead to different iterations of the room past it, depending on certain conditions, in case anyone didn’t read the frankly irresponsibly long write up on this. Also, after a few false starts and nearly killing… after a few false starts, we’ve gotten positioning and connections down to the point that we can link them together to rapidly assemble large scale structures, if we’ve got the right patterns to work with.”

“...this is the happiest day of my year.” James closed his eyes and let out a long breath. “Okay. I assume there’s bad news? Because you said so?”

“Yes. Plumbing and wiring are proving to be \*major\* challenges. Also, each totem has a finite amount of matter.”

“...As in…it can’t go beyond a certain amount at once?” Harvey asked. “Because that’s not an issue. Delvers bring back new orbs every week.”

Davis sucked in a nervous breath. “As in, there’s a finite amount it can copy, period. When we shut down an orb, it drags most of it back in, but removed samples stay real, and deduct from the limit. And they won’t go back later. Basically, we can’t use them as factories. Though we \*can\* get, say, a few thousand chairs out of one, and then just discard it. If we wanted to.”

“Furniture in general. Chairs, lamps, whatever. Only works with commonly used materials, though. So far! Can’t copy a silver chair.” Davis shrugged. “Anyway. We expect that we’ll be able to begin laying the foundation for the trial arcology by the end of the year. Though Bill has asked that I ask you to hire more people for the initial construction, so it can be as polished as possible, and-“

164 Akashic Sewer -> 3 books -> Frequency-Of-Sunlight = history

“No, first, book!” Frequency-Of-Sunlight reminded them. “That one.” She stated, not indiciating which of the three books Anesh was holding she meant at all.

Anesh looked down at the stack of bound paper in his hand. “This one?” He asked, offering one to her.

“Good enough.” The camraconda agreed, taking it in her fangs and gently setting it on the floor before flipping it open. A second later, the book dusted away into nothing, and Frequency-Of-Sunlight looked up at them. “History!” She declared. “This will be easy! All history is new to me!”

165 bone orbs (heals bones)

“I’m fine.” James said. “We copied a bunch of the broken bone orbs a couple days ago, and I took enough that even with the diminishing returns, my hand is fine again.” He spread his fingers for emphasis with a smile. “I think I’m at, like, four total preventions per year? I mean… not \*this\* year, obviously. Used em all up already. But I’m good.”

**165 route horizon (EL road dungeon) = person dies and leaves behond a globes**

Kirk elaborated. “Yeah. They figured it was just a matter of time before you killed us for what we did.” He still didn’t have any emotion in his voice except quiet resignation. “This place does kinda feel like a ‘last meal’ sort of deal. And then you’d get our globes, too.”

“Sorry, what?” James raised his eyebrows.

The others gave either shocked, or furious looks, directed at both James and Kirk equally, as Kirk just shrugged. “What we call the place where the spell map bits go. We’ve all got ‘em. And… we know they can be taken if we die. So they just figured.”

“Huh.” James said. “That’s gonna be weird for the people who took the memory wipe option.” He mused. “Awkward. Not gonna kill you, in case you were wondering.” James sighed, and pushed himself up to his feet, wincing at how sore his soles still were. “Okay, so, here’s the deal,” he said as he started pacing, “we have no idea what to do with you.”

169 high school dungeon -> books -> james -> Lesson Continues : Biology II 122 / 1800, Endurance II]

“You must choose!” The bladed ball of hate clad in a tweed jacket that was Teacher stood at the front of the class. “Plagiarist! Decide and-!”

James cut it off. “Endurance again.” He said. Zero interest in the other options.

Then he was back where he had been, legs suddenly feeling… well, not ‘better’, really. But despite the aches and pains, he knew he could run another five miles if he needed to. He croaked out a word, calling up his syllabus from the Akashic Sewer.

[Lesson Continues : Basketball II 288 / 1200, Accuracy I, Agility I

Lesson Continues : Biology II 122 / 1800, Endurance II]

“Alright.” James said to Anesh. “So. The Lessons \*do\* scale up way more if you have two of them, the second one goes up more, and the whole jump between here and the classroom place is jarring and awful, even if I don’t remember most of I t.” He said. “Also, I know a lot about sharks now.”

170 purple orbs

And, of course, everyone had been given an armory kit of purples. All six of them, if they hadn’t had it already, had gotten an extra meter and a half of safe fall distance, a couple prevented broken bones, an extra half liter of daily blood production, and a degree and a half of temperature tolerance.

173 winter climb -> text books from dorm + 1 available leaning = james + anesh + alanna + arrush + alex + nik

“Oh, before you go.” Anesh leaned down and unzipped the backpack he’d been hauling around, revealing a row of textbook spines. Most of them battered, slightly waterlogged, and otherwise damaged. “Want a rundown of the dungeon’s power?”

“It has been \*two hours\*.” James spoke with resignation. “Is this Nik? Did Nik just start cramming more magic into his face?”

“Surprisingly, yes.” Anesh said. “But don’t think too badly of him, I asked, and we had backup around.” He sat back, not bothering to pull the books out of the bag. “Each of these corresponds to a skill. Not specifically a college course or anything, but there’s a lot of overlap. For whatever reason, we all have one slot for them that we got when we left. \*I\* think it’s because we killed the dragon, but it might be something else. Anyway. The books contain a single power that resonates with the skill it lists. You \*do\* get a chance to refuse if you want, and a little advance knowledge, which is nice. The books-“

“Yeah, dang, how often do the dungeons actually ask for informed consent?” James cut in. Then, seeing Anesh glowering at him, held up his hands placatingly. “Sorry! Carry on!”

“...the \*books\*, James, are reusable.” Anesh switched back to his normal lecture tone. “Same power every time. What am I forgetting?”

“Do the powers cost anything, and is it blood?” Alanna said, not opening her eyes from the bed.

Anesh nodded. “Yes, and no. Breath. As in, the pool we’ve already gotten. But \*here’s the thing\* that makes it a problem. When you spend your Breath mana, or whatever we’re gonna call it, it apparently feels like it’s sucking the actual air out of your lungs. Along with a drop in internal temperature. And that’s not just a feeling; it \*does\* make you colder.”

“That might be useful, actually.” James said. “As far as side effects go. We could go to California!”

“We already go to California. Regularly.” Anesh looked confused.

“We could go \*outside\* in California, and not just an air conditioned office!”

“Touché.” Anesh nodded. “Anyway. **Nik and Alex picked already. Nik took the anatomy book, and got a power that lets him replenish blood with ice, snow, or cold enough water. I think he’s actually trying to end up as a healer. Alex took the Endurance book you… I guess made? It’s weird. Oh, also, no idea if the books being damaged makes them less effective.**”

“What do we have? I might save my slot.” Alanna muttered.

“Go to sleep!” James bopped her on the nose. “This can all wait!”

Anesh answered her anyway. “**Human anatomy, spatial geometry, civil architecture, the Endurance one, early history of Australian Aboriginal peoples, and one that’s got a damaged title but I’m pretty sure is just industrial workplace safety. Got a preference?**”

“I don’t… know.” James said. “Doubling up on Endurance tempts me. I’ll talk to Alex first, though.”

**From the door to the room, a raspy voice called their attention. “Architecture, please.”**

**James snapped his head up to see Arrush**, IV stand dragging behind him, wearing nothing but his fur and a half ton worth of bandages and splints, standing and barely supporting himself against the doorframe. “Jesus Christ! Get back in bed! What are you \*doing\*!?” He rushed over, Anesh shoving his chair back behind him and keeping up. As gently as possible, remembering what Deb had said, James looped an arm under one of Arrush’s main limbs, and tried to support as much of the ratroach’s weight as he could. “Come on, carefully now.” He moved slowly, linking hands with Anesh to support Arrush’s back, and guiding him back to his bed.

174 winter climb -> books -> Alex -> takes breath away more than half a second

“Assuming it doesn’t kill us.” Alex added. “I’ve tested mine. It takes my Breath away so fast, it feels like my lungs’ll collapse if I use it for more than a half second.” She paused. “I think James overloaded it, honestly. Nik’s doesn’t do that. But it’s still worth knowing.”

James sighed, and let it drop. “Honestly, I dunno. You said the Endurance book is… uh… bad?”

“Yeah, it takes so much breath, it chokes me almost instantly. \*Cold\*, too! But… well, it feels like I’m invincible when I use it. I actually think I could get shot in the head and walk it off.” Alex admitted, and then rapidly followed that up with “Not that we’ve tested that! I’m not stupid, man.”

174 winter climb -> book (‘Fundamentals of Architecture, 8th Edition’ )-> james + arrush = **[Thermodynamic Tunnel | Five Breaths | Permanent]**

Reaching under his coat, getting slightly annoyed that the mild creeping cold here somehow bothered him more than the below freezing temperatures of the Climb, James pulled out the thick textbook he’d been holding against his side.

**‘Fundamentals of Architecture, 8th Edition’** read the cover, over an image of an unassuming skyline. It was the kind of thing James was terrified they might actually \*lose\*, it looked so much like a normal book. Even with the scorch marks and cover damage where it had been buried under a pile of ice.

“It isn’t… a good idea.” Arrush huffed out. “Breath… comes too… slow. Not good for me.” He sounded defeated.

But James had the perfect answer to that one, at least. Several answers, really. “Well, we’re gonna get your breathing up to optimal eventually anyway, once Deb does her science magic and we have more shaper substance. Also, I’m taking this one too, and we need to test what happens if two people use the same book. And \*also\*, it’s not single use, so you’re not ‘taking’ anything from anyone else.” He smiled, and then added quietly. “Also, you said you wanted to build things. And I know how that feels. So.” He held out the book to Arrush.

“Have you…?”

“Not yet. Want me to go first?” James asked.

**Arrush looked, a ripple of blinks going down his eyes, before he shook his head, sending a couple drops of acidic saliva across the roof, and reached out to grab the book.**

**He would, James knew, instantly get the same mental prompt that James had been getting the whole time. As Arrush closed his eyes, James did the same, and mentally gave an affirmative.**

His breath flowed out of him. Both the stored mana in his chest, and the actual air in his lungs. A long exhalation, until there was nothing left but the emptiness waiting to be filled. His body temperature dropped, fingertips starting to ache from the cold, a shiver running through him. His head swam, suddenly out of oxygen, and out of heat.

And then, nothing in its way, the spell clicked into place.

**[Thermodynamic Tunnel | Five Breaths | Permanent]**

He and Arrush snapped their eyes open together, just as Keeka made a concerned chittering squeak.

**James sucked in air greedily, lungs pumping to refill his body and his soul with that vital force. He shivered with more cold than the chilly rain could have possibly brought on, and saw Arrush doing the same thing. Though the ratroach was gasping a lot harder than he was.**

**Two minutes later, James realized exactly how fast his Breath refilled itself. And, armed with the knowledge of what this spell did, he breathed out, and imprinted his will and his life force upon the world.**

He selected a point over the street, and pulled, carving a tunnel through physics, settling the end over where Arrush and Keeka still balanced on the wall, though with the smaller sleeker ratroach now doing most of the stabilizing. Then, feeling more cold creep into his veins, James finished the exhalation, and let the spell crystalize into place.

The air warmed. Not much, but a little. As the ten foot wide orb of space James had designated over the street began to pour heat through the abstract tunnel, in defiance of the basic laws of physics. The warmth from that chunk of air and the rain passing through it sapped away, and deposited on this end, over the two ratroaches on the edge of the roof.

James almost collapsed as he struggled to suck in a breath again after that. “Ooooohkay.” He wheezed. “Wow, that takes it out of you.” He gasped. Then, he felt the soft flickering of warmth brush against him, and knew, more than just with the magic’s implanted knowledge, that it had worked. “Oh.” He blinked as he continued to catch his breath. “That… might have been a bad idea.” He admitted, looking out to where a portion of the rain was turning almost to freezing as it fell.

Before he left, he confirmed it. Arrush had gotten the same spell he had, down to the fine details.

And that thermal linking wouldn’t go away until he told it to.

177 green orb -> trash clean up

She gave an overdramatic artificial sigh. “Fine. But look, it could be worse. At least the hotel doesn’t smell anymore.”

The hotel didn’t smell anymore because he’d managed to get ahold of some copies of the green orb that removed garbage. It was small enough to go in the one miscellaneous copy run every week, and Bill had handed them off to Myles when he’d come down to help assess building stability. The diminishing returns on skills meant that it made more sense to let four different people crack them, so Myles had handed them off to the ex-cultists to learn about birds or something. The diminishing returns also meant that the building only magically vaporized twenty five-ish pounds of trash a day, but it had been a few days already, and the smell had apparently gone out with the random gross things in the various room garbage cans, and \*especially\* all the rotting food in the commercial kitchen.

178 dungeon -> exploding water cooler trap (((((water cooler = monsters now))))

“Only a hundred meters or so.” Anesh pulled out the notepad he had clipped to his side and was using to keep map notes. “Just before that exploding water cooler trap.”

178 part rank orbs

[+.9 Skill Ranks : Gambling - Baccarat]

“I’m still confused as to why some of these give part-ranks.” Sarah said, watching the colorful dust of the orb fade to nothingness.

Anesh, pulling a chair in from an adjacent cubicle and sliding his backpack to the floor as he dropped into it, perked up at the question he could actually answer. “They have a structured drop-off in effectiveness if they’re copies of an orb you’ve already used. I think they stop doing anything entirely after four uses. It goes one, point six, point two, point one, nothing.” He thought for a second, then corrected. “Okay, not ‘nothing’. But ‘plus zero ranks’. So, nothing.”

178 winter climb -> book -> anesh + tattered textbook on spatial geometry + [Fractal Avalanche | Two Breaths | Seconds]

ames had taken something for architecture, because that’s who James was. Nik had grabbed something he thought would be good for healing, because that’s how Nik was. But Anesh? Anesh was a mathematician. Not for an end goal, but because he understood it, and loved the work itself. So he’d taken the tattered textbook on spatial geometry, and just accepted he was going to get what he got.

[Fractal Avalanche | Two Breaths | Seconds] had been the magic that settled into his lungs, just under the ball of power that accumulated as he breathed normally. And now, he pushed out his Breath, and the spell along with it.

\*Unfortunately\*, this was one case where having multiple bodies wasn’t a great solution. Every iteration of him, as long as they stayed ‘updated’, actually shared a Breath pool. Which would mean that the rest of him would get a painfully cold signal that one of them was casting as the spell went off.

Fortunately, though, the spell worked the way he wanted it to. Anesh moved \*through\* Sarah, his sensory self emanating from what would have been his actual position, but his physical form shattered into a dozen pieces. He got a good look at the camraconda that was staring her down, too, all blue Ethernet cable and one of those domed pod cameras for a head and a set of two rows of green LEDs down its flanks. It was weird, none of the camracondas that had become part of the Order had LEDs. Maybe they were an older model thing. And then, with minimal time to consider that, from a dozen different perspectives, Anesh slammed into the camraconda as he reformed into a single entity.

The end result was him on the ground with the snake in a chokehold, one hand clamped over its eye so hard he felt the plastic chitin cracking. At least one of his projections had elbow dropped the monster in the side of its neck, and its thrashing was weaker than Anesh expected as he pinned it down and freed Sarah.

178 momo + scrambler totems

Her world narrowed to the fight. Green-black ichor or blood or whatever Deb had decided it was, red sparks, the burn of her muscles as she swung her staff hard enough to break bones, the screams of the bugs still throwing themselves at her, the clinical tactical choice of activating a few of her scrambler totems and flinging them into their nests along the wall. It all blurred together.

180 high school dungeon -> books -> various level upgrades

The Sewer news continued. Despite being scattered to completely different places in their professional and personal lives, the five people who had taken copies of the drama lesson had finally managed to rank it up together again, collectively adding Poise I to their abilities, but that would probably be as far as the larger group could get alone. Two of the camracondas with lessons had improved theirs as well, Frequency-Of-Sunlight diving into learning history with a kind of optimistic glee, and ending up with Solidity I and Malleability II, and Texture-Of-Barkdust apparently taking private lessons from Karen while she recovered from something flu-adjacent, ending up with Perspective I.

180 momo totem = **knowing the total lifespan of every cephalopod in the building**

Anesh continued his recap while James ate and the room around them moved. A Response team made a sudden exit, a group of students stole their table to study, **there was a brief moment of knowing the total lifespan of every cephalopod in the building which James assumed was Momo’s fault somehow**, and a few people stopped by to welcome him back or ask him or Anesh questions. It was kind of hectic and also kind of peaceful; stuff happening at its own speed, with nothing really \*needed\* of him.

182 blue orbs (little bit about red orbs) but making blue orb tool life

“Hey Dave.” James said, eliciting a ‘hm?’ from his friend before he continued. “You’re the one who probably has the most insight into the blue orbs. Why \*aren’t\* we making dungeontech with them?”

“Oh, we just don’t know how.” Dave said with a shrug. “Sarah says that they come from totems, but she couldn’t remember why she thinks that. Personally… I dunno. Maybe? I actually think they’re not something we can make.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. They’re, like, like the traps you know? The traps drop reds, but we \*know\* what reds do when they’re broken, totemed, and shaped. And I doubt absorbing a red turns you into an Indiana Jones problem, right?” Dave shrugged. “I just don’t think we can make a ‘magic item’ like the dungeon does. Sorry, man.”

“Dang. Cause I was gonna say ‘magic camraconda arms’ and then do this and see what happened.” He threw one of the blues he was holding in an overhand arc. Dave lazily caught it out of the air, just over Frequency’s snout as she traced its trajectory. “Also, ‘shaped’?”

“I would have loved magic arms.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight said off to the side.

“Made into life.” Dave said, rolling the orb in his fingers, holding it up to catch the overcasts light from the open backdoors of the van. “Like Pendragon.”

“Hey, wait!” Alex called, before her thudding footsteps heralded her sliding across the van’s floor to join their group, leaving a grumbling Pendragon behind without a source of pets.. “Just make blue life!”

Dave and James shared a glance. Dave shrugged, but James had other plans. “Alex, the blues are conceptually aspected toward being tools.” He said calmly. “We don’t make life to be tools. That’s just not something we do.”

“No, but see, it actually makes sense!” Alex breathlessly exclaimed. “Half the stupid magic items have these weird fuzzy boundaries around what they can do, right? And all those weird quirks suddenly make a lot of sense if you imagine that the items are a tiny bit alive, and making decisions! Like, why does the paperweight ignore force from one direction, but \*not the orbit of Earth\*? Because it’s alive, and not stupid!”

Frequency-Of-Sunlight twisted her body, flopping her front half over her tail to stare up at James, now upside down in her vision. “I apologize.” She said. “I should not have complained. Now I have a headache. Apologizing is good manners.”

“You know, half the time, I can’t tell if your people are messing with me with the things you say.” James told her with a smirk.

“We are learning quickly, yes.” Frequency-Of-Sunlight replied with a bronze-toothed camraconda grin. James appreciated that more of them were becoming more comfortable actually showing their fangs when they smiled; it had bothered him more than seeing the stabby rows of teeth when he’d learned that a lot of camracondas just didn’t smile so they wouldn’t alarm anyone.

“Guys, I’m serious!” Alex said, spinning on her knees on the metal floor to face Dave. “Dave, you agree with… Dave?”

Dave had checked out, and was now intently staring at the orb in his palm. “A living tool, huh?” He muttered. “Thought following task…”

“Dave, no.” James admonished him. And then, realizing Dave had that look in his eye of someone who was experiencing a deep insight into the mystical reality of their world, the kind of which usually ended with a breakthrough or an explosion, added, “Dave, no!”

184 blue orb life + lunch box (infinite)

James listened in as best he could as he passed, and remembered Alex’s theory from earlier in the day - was it really only a couple hours ago? - that dungeontech from the Office was actually just blue orb Life. Because nothing, \*nothing\* that wasn’t alive, and kind of sarcastic, could have such a specific categorization of what ‘lunch’ was as that stupid box. That stupid, amazing, perfect lunchbox. Literally every example he overheard was appended with ‘but it depends’.

189 order (LA office) -> vending machine -> pancake soda -> james -> purple orb

“God dammit we’ve upgraded to running.” James groaned as he pushed himself to his feet. “Okay. But I’m getting a drink first.”

His partner waited patiently while he picked a random drink, blindly covered the label, cracked it open, and took a sip. And then made a horrified noise at the flavor of drinking a pancake. Alanna watched on as James’ face twisted in concern, and then he took another sip. “Stop drinking it!” She exclaimed after the third sip and groan.

“I can’t. I’ve committed to this.” James said, before gulping down the last of the can.

And feeling something hit the back of his throat, making him choke slightly, before a small burst of pressure formed in his mouth, and a thought ran through his head, even as a squawk left his mouth.

[Shell Upgraded : Breathing - Exhalation Force - PSI - +14.8]

“Ooh, orb?” Alanna asked, giving the vending machine an unreturned high-five that was really more of a pat on the side.

“Aaah, my tongue.” James poked at his mouth. “Also what a useless orb.”

189 reed + anesh + blue orbs + create tool / life with blue orbs

Reed, sensing the threat of being caught in another engineering explanation was mostly past, walked by lugging a deep cardboard box full of pens. “They’re infusions, like life for every other orb color.” He called to Anesh as he walked by, Anesh waving to the engineers to break off and trail in Reed’s wake as he made his way over to a shelf against the wall of an overcrowded corridor and slammed the box down on an empty spot. “Whooof. Yeah, they’re life. Alex was right. But you can’t make them like normal life, it doesn’t work. They’re just a tiny bit of intelligent decision making, not an actual person.”

“Ethically shaky, determining what is and isn’t a person.” Anesh hummed as he pursed his lips at Reed, face contorting in concern.

The curly haired head of Research waved him off with one hand while he rearranged something in his box. “Look, we have a lot of weird shit down here. Let me tell you that we’ve run a \*bunch\* of different tests for communication or emotion off of the various blue items, before we even started trying to make them.”

Anesh wasn’t sure he believed that, but he was on a time limit. “Just… tell me what I need to know so I can pass it along.”

“The basics? Dungeontech items are slightly alive, not people, and are really, \*really\* rigid in focus. Ethically, if you \*really\* want to measure it, and I don’t, it’s probably more okay to make a magic item than to, like, eat chicken? Anyway. Your best bet is making things that add one strange function to something that already does a thing. Like, no trying to turn a stick into headphones, you know? Turn headphones into slightly better headphones.” He shrugged. “We’re working on more stuff. Oh! Someone made a paper dragon that’s kind of like what you said Pendragon was as a baby. Can you ask Dave to come by sometime and make sure we’re not screwing anything up?”

“Reed, how much life are you making down here?”

“Not… too much!” Reed flushed red, not meeting Anesh’s eyes. “Anyway, I have to go check on some stuff. We can catch up later, right?”

**190 dungeon (office) -> 36 purple orbs + totem copier**

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

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

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

190 purple orbs and lots of crush effects of them

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

And then he took his own advice.

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

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

[Shell Upgraded : Warts - -16/Month]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

192 folks use of orbs

Momo, operating just on instinct, could make totems out of red orbs that could do stuff way outside half the actual literal spells James had access to. Dave could absorb twice as many blues as James could. And there were a half dozen people who had all found ways to make life of varying types beyond the one that James had the skill to awkwardly manifest.

**193 knowledge tree -> alchemist -> lung cancer potion + purple orb -> remove a cancer per year**

“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.”

“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.”

End book three