Notes (orbs) and (books)

NOTES (BOOK 2)

chapter number -> short detail if more than a second line. then longer copy paste of details. attempt to include just enough without going over to include details of what is needed. (story jumps to much, sometimes to many paragraphs, so min amount is attempted to copy/paste for details)

orbs for 1st dungoen,

books for high school dungeon + red sparks, and green fire for this dungeon. ((NOTE see monster section there is some cross over possibly and not included here))

totems more so momo totems but some others i think

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74 (Questions And Answers) = few things in it about orbs

75 = Aneshs + orbs

Exhausting in a good way, though. And he had not one, but two Aneshs (Aneshi?) to help him out. In theory, they had a nearly unlimited number of Anesh-based life forms to help out, actually. In the aftermath of the great escape, it had taken James almost two days to finally get around to actually \*asking\* Anesh why there was a backup of him running around. As it turned out, it was pretty simple, in the kind of way that ‘dungeon nonsense’ was ever simple.

Anesh had, over the week while the were in the dungeon, managed to figure out how to absorb an orange orb. The one single one that he’d kept in reserve for almost a month. According to him, the secret was understanding the concept of them. Just like yellows were time, and blues were tools, oranges were the dungeon’s avatar of complexity. And after absorbing it, he’d gotten himself a… well, calling it a power would’ve been kind of off, in a few ways.

A job, maybe? A task, perhaps. Or, to the mind of someone like James who played a lot of card games, a triggered ability.

Point was, Anesh now had his own personal sidequest. Once a week, all he had to do was remove six license plates from separate white four-door sedans that had functioning radios, and boom. Reward granted, ability activated. In this case, the outcome was pretty simple. An extra Anesh.

As he was the first and only person to absorb an orange, they were unclear on whether or not this would be a similar effect for anyone else. Would the quest change? The reward? Both? Probably both, hopefully both. Did it work like the blues where you could only absorb so many at a time? What did it mean to be two copies of the same person? How did the \*copy\* feel? Could they even tell anymore which was which? The philosophical and moral questions this posed were absolutely mind boggling, and could have astounded humanity for \*decades\*. Hell, those questions \*had\* astounded humanity for almost as long as we’d had stories about magic and the future; this just took those hypotheticals and made them very real, pertinent issues. So of course, Anesh used it to double up on his university classes.

83 = ti chi / silver orb / ball bearing !??!

She hopped off the steps, nudging James back a bit before glancing around them. Waiting patiently for the neighbor who was taking his trash out to get back around the corner and into his apartment, Sarah dug her hands into the pockets of her ancient denim jacket and rustled around until she came out with a small ball bearing.

“Ah, a silver orb!” James exclaimed, earning himself a fwap on the arm with the sleeve of her coat.

“Shut up you goober! Now watch this.” Sarah took a few steps back, and stretched a bit before falling into a suddenly graceful sweep of her arms. She did a few basic motions before lunging forward slightly, her left arm extended forward, palm out; and her right arm pulled back near her breast. James noticed, then that the ball bearing that she’d had in her hand was now hovering, suspended about an inch over the middle finger of her right hand.

And then, it was \*gone\*. An instant later, there was the noise of tearing vegetation from the direction of the barrier of blackberry bushes that marked the boundary of their parking lot, the same direction that Sarah’s other arm was pointed to like an arrow.

She stood up with a quick shake of her wrists, and sighed a deep breath as she opened her eyes and looked at James.

“What the \*fuck\*?” He asked, perplexed.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to use the purple orb that lets me control magnetic fields. It’s super hard, ‘cause it’s not a muscle I’ve ever had, you know?” She gestured off toward the bushes where, presumably, the ball bearing had been launched. “I dunno how fast that can actually go, but… I think I probably should have checked there was no one on the other side, you know?”

“I’m suddenly very worried about our living room.” James said with a grim frown.

Sarah winced. “That was actually what I wanted to tell you about?”

84 hourglass shaped totem holding the bright orange orb in it.

The two looked at her, feeling the wind go out of their banter. It wasn’t as funny when someone was actually confused instead of just hamming it up. “Yeah, we do. Speaking of, let’s go check out the hallway that flips people upside down. Sounds great.” James patted the other guy on the shoulder, before moving past him.

Everyone followed.

It took three tries, a sprained wrist, and a half dozen bruises, before they figured out that the hallway gradually changed the orientation of the horizon for those walking down it in one direction, but not the other. Hence why turning around kept throwing them into the floor. It didn’t help that it was almost imperceptible to people who were watching from \*outside\* the hallway, so they had to form a kind of human chain to see how far up the walls or ceiling those in front of them were walking. From there, though, it wasn’t too hard to figure out the limits of the effect, and start scouring the nearby cubes until they found the hourglass shaped totem holding the bright orange orb in it.

87 = eating orbs

“So!” James said around a mouthful of salmon. “Anyone… I’m sorry, hang on. What the hell is happening over there?”

JP looked up from where he’d balanced, precariously, on the end of his fork, a single yellow orb drenched in maple syrup. “What? No idea.”

“You can’t eat the orbs.” James informed his friend, angling a fork in JP’s direction.

Responding in the most mature way possible, JP gave a toothy smile and clamped his mouth around the fork, making a show of chewing dramatically before swallowing, and letting out a small puff of yellow dust. “Delicious.” He nodded to himself. “Tastes exactly like how I imagined fungal classifications to taste.”

“How… and I hesitate to ask… did…”

“Not great.” JP answered preemptively. “That’s why I slathered it in syrup.”

“They taste better with soy sauce.” Sarah informed him, adroitly.

Alanna snickered, and most of the table joined in. Rolling his eyes, James conceded the point. “Alright, I guess there’s no wrong way to eat your orbs. Except for everything both of you just said. But whatevs. So! How’d everyone feel about tonight?”

88 = totems + momo

“Yup! Well, I mean, I can replicate the one Lily made, and it does the same thing. So it’s not magic to \*make\* them.” She opened the door to one of the rooms, and Alanna instantly knew how outside it was a chilly sixty two degrees, while just inside the door of the office it was a balmy seventy four. It was also drizzling. “Mine stops at doors, though?” Momo explained, as if that explained anything. “I don’t know why. Lily’s didn’t, but that one got… um… broken?”

88 totem hospitals / clinics nearby + momo

“Ah. Well.” The goth wiped her eyes on the sleeves of her shirt, absolutely not crying in the slightest. “We can talk about that later. I wanted to show you this!” Her energy spiked back up as she turned to show Alanna the totem. “This is attempt number.. oh, fuck, I dunno, three hundred? The lines don’t actually seem to correspond to anything, as far as I can tell, \*yet\*.” Momo plucked the red orb out of the other totem, and the knowledge of the local weather patterns was gone instantly. “But check this out.” She inserted it into the bizarre dream catcher shape she’d built, and all of a sudden, Alanna knew.

There was a hospital thirteen miles away. The wait time for emergency care was sixteen minutes. There was a veterinary clinic eight miles away. The wait time for emergency care was eight minutes, but the chance for survival for major trauma was reduced by sixty eight percent. There was a private physician two miles away. The wait time for emergency care was under a minute.

Momo popped the orb out as Alanna’s head started to hurt.

“Fucking \*ow\*.” Alanna muttered, dabbing at something wet under her nose and finding that she was bleeding. “What the hell was that?”

Momo tossed her a roll of paper towels, which she caught and started using to mop up the bloody nose; Momo herself seemed unaffected. “It lists sites for emergency trauma care by distance.” She explained. “But I can’t figure out how to get the limiter on it, so it just keeps going if you let it.” She suddenly looked so sad. “I know it’s not that useful, I just wanted to show…”

92 = blue orbs = some folks can not absorb them = replace contractors outside of dungeon

“We are getting off track.” James rubbed his eyes in frustration. “Again. Karen, we have a budget, and we’ll talk more about that in a second. Now, second point! We’re not using enough blues! The powers from absorbing blues are often incredibly situational, inflexible, and absolutely broken. So, everyone, especially anyone on the active roster, should have at least one slotted all the time. We still don’t know why some people can’t, so no pressure if that’s you, but if you can, there’s no reason not to have one. And we \*do\* have a stockpile of blues on hand for that. Though I think Anesh used a bunch of them to get this place set up?”

“They basically replace contractors if you get lucky, yeah.” Anesh acknowledged, looking wistfully around at the warehouse space as if that explained anything.

95 =

“Ooookay.” James cleared his throat, a little uncomfortable about repeating things. It was that feeling you got when someone missed a word in conversation; you knew that saying it again was important, but if you said it again, it wasn’t conversation anymore, it was performance, and that was awkward. But he tried anyway. “So, the general thought that we’ve got is that each orb color can make life, in the same way yellows do. That was something we never really experimented with, because of the ethics of it, but we know it works. Thing is, we’ve seen dungeon life that clearly uses orange orbs, and most of the boss-types are greens. I suspect that Lily and the iLipedes are reds. Secret and his ilk are absolutely purple.”

“Okay, makes sense.” Anesh nodded. “What’s it mean for us?”

“Well, that’s the thing. It explains a lot of holes in our theories up to this point.” James ran a hand through his hair, trying to get it out from where the long strands were trapped under him and against the cushions. “We’ve been assuming that blues make items, but I think that it’s the same way. \*Any\* orb can make an item, it’s just what comes out that changes based on the color. The blue ones are… varied and weird. The red ones are the traps. I doubt we’ve seen any purples or greens, but..”

Anesh cut him off. “The briefcases.” He said.

“What?”

“The briefcases. Bet you a Baby Things those are the green items.”

“So, this really spreads out what each orb can do to a staggering level, doesn’t it?” Anesh asked. “What’s the list now?”

James rattled off the concepts off the top of his head. “Crack, absorb, life, item, totem. Not that many.”

102

“I’m making breakthroughs in theory, James!” Anesh yelled back. “The reds and yellows are of the mind, the oranges and greens of the \*place\*, and the blues and purples are the body! It all makes sense!”

“Shouldn’t the reds make infomorphs then?” James yelled upward, noting a few people around him chuckling.

There was silence for a second, and he could have sworn he heard muffled swearing from ten stories up. And then; “I’ll be down in a minute.” Anesh shouted.

103

“I was actually thinking about this. The math on the reds is constant, for the totems. And now we have a green totem to study, as well as the oranges we keep finding. I’m not sure about those, but I’m \*reasonably\* sure I understand the yellows well enough to make a totem out of them.”

“No!” and “Hard no!” echoed as James and Alanna spoke at the same time. James picked up that line of thinking. “Anesh, we know very few things about the yellows, but one of them is that to absorb them, you have to understand that they are themselves a congealed function of \*time\*. Now, I know that the totems for the reds produce information, which seems to be their thing, and the oranges and greens seem to be about spaces. So I am going to say this once; don’t fuck with time.”

“What! But we could probably do it safely!” Anesh protested. James glared at him, and he shriveled in his seat. “Okay, probably.” The glare did not relent. “Okay, fine! I won’t fuck with time!”

103 james absorb orange orb

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Now try yours.”

James looked at the small orb in his hand. It was the smallest orange they’d found, from a hallway that looped on itself sometimes. He tried to imagine that feeling. The feeling of being a hallway that had a new task, of being bent into the shape of a new job that you didn’t particularly want. Then he realized he didn’t have to pretend that hard; six months ago, that was \*him\*. He could have been that hall. Could have been just a series of certifications without context or meaning.

It didn’t matter that the task was a layer of complexity. Complexity without meaning was despair. The orb was something more than that, wasn’t it? It was complexity, with a purpose. It shifted not just what was done, but ascribed a satisfied sense of a job well done to it. None of the spatial warps ever felt \*sad\* to James. He imagined that Anesh had found a different shade of color in his idea of complexity, but here, this was his. It was complex. It was complexity. It was his job to take that dense bundle of functionality and make it \*do something\*.

The orb slipped into his palm, effortlessly.

[Task Ascribed : Input - eat seven apples : Output - 16.2 grams Saffron : Time Frame - 3 days]

104 Resonance Option = purple orbs -> \*incubate symbiotic infomorphs\* = a pet per team

“It’s the partitioned part of the basement behind the research area. It has locks!” James cheerfully informed him, before his smile slipped. “And these are just reports people have been giving me. Notes on therapy meetings and skulljack capabilities, xenotech use cases, expenses and stuff, and… okay, I wanna get your opinion on something. This one is an authorization request from our research division for something called ‘Resonance Option’?”

Dave nodded. “Okay? And?”

James looked back down at the page, trying to put aside the headache that the name caused him long enough to scan the words. “Um… they want permission to start using the purple orbs a lot of people have been \*saving up\* - what? - to \*incubate symbiotic infomorphs\* - Dave I have concerns about this.”

It wasn’t really that much different than the earlier proposed idea of having at least one form of dungeon life per team, either in a support role or as a battle buddy. Magneto, the dog-ish thing that Momo’s team had made out of the magnetic distortion of an old computer monitor, was a perfect example. He wasn’t a bruiser, but he was hard to kill, loyal to his friends, and made of magnets. Ganesh filled a perfect scout role for their original team, too, and even their newfound use of skulljacked drone control didn’t fully replace him, since he was far more flexible and intelligent. Also armed. Oh, and there was Pendragon, too, who was just a flying tank. Having every team in some way paired up with something that helped expand their options was a good idea.

So why did this plan make him apprehensive?

108 orbs + coffee copier

“We’re not sure.” Anesh cut him off. “But just like how most people can only absorb one blue, with some Dave-style exceptions, it turns out you can’t actually take too many copies of any given single orb.”

James bit his lip as he gave a stupid grin. “What I’m hearing is that we \*can\* copy orbs to repeat the effects?”

“Hm? Oh, yes. But not too much. That’s sort of the problem. It takes a stupid amount of mana coffee to do it, too!” Anesh complained. “There doesn’t appear to be any function to determine how much, either. Purples take comparatively little, actually. Blues and yellows take the most, with oranges taking the least. And when I say ‘the most’, what I mean is ‘six or seven bags, \*probably\* more if it’s a larger orb, and that’s after I cut it with normal coffee’. It’s about the density of mana coffee, really, not that it actually takes more stuff per ritual. So, we don’t get to make tailored skillsets.” Anesh finished.

“Well, we’ve got a few tools.” Anesh said, relaxing a bit as James stopped pressing on the obvious Incident that had occurred. “Lily is one. And we do have the option of duplicating her, though there are obvious ethical concerns with that. Scanning orbs, finding categories we want to dive into, then duplicating those once. We take the duplicate, crack it, figure out what it is and if we want to make more. Always keep one on file, \*clearly labeled\*, possibly with something duct taped to it…”

“Oh, damn, that’s awesome.” James nodded, his brain already feeling like it was pouring information just on the edge of his memory into that buffer of ‘things to talk about’. Anesh had a few more of these sitting next to him; one of them per delver was absolutely a good investment, if nothing else. “Wait. The costs are based on how useful it is?” James scoffed. “I’m starting to feel like the Office is a really frustrated GM, constantly reminding us that while it ‘makes sense’, that everything we’re doing is breaking game balance.”

“And… I don’t really know how to explain this to you. Have you never run a game before where you’ve had to find creative ways to tell your players to stop fucking around like this?” Anesh asked.

110 Orange Orbs

Order Of Endless Rooms Operations Manual.

Section 5-1, Part 4 : Officium Mundi, Treasures - Orange Orbs

Orange orbs, as their primary use (breaking) provide legal status. Correlation between size and effect appears to be the number of employees in the office that handles the given certification - I.E., the more people employed by a bureaucracy, the larger an orb would be required to affect it.

It is important to note that legal status is not the same thing as actual ability. A pilot’s license does not teach you to fly a plane.

Absorbing an orange orb generates a task that can be repeated after a set cooldown period. The completion of the task generates a material reward. It does not appear that tasks can be removed once absorbed. Too, we do not understand why a certain amount of time spent inside Officium Mundi is required before absorption is possible, but it is theorized that after enough time, additional absorptions will be possible.

As far as can be determined, the matter is created from nothing, making this one of several options for defeating entropy on a longer timeline.

Officium Mundi utilizes the totem form of the orange orb to create spatial warps. For a full list of non-normal spaces encountered, see Section 6 Part 4 (Hazards, Spatial).

\*Experimenting with orange totems is both not recommended, and actually forbidden by Order authority.\*

Some dungeon Life will also drop orange orbs. These are exclusively ones that contain compact spaces within themselves. For more details, see Section 3 Part 7 (The Copier) and Part 10 (Tapir).

A full list of acquired licenses and tasks is as follows...

116 order (real world) -> green orb

It was Virgil this time who acknowledged the tossing of the last wager into the hat, and cracked the orb. And it was \*only\* cracking with greens. Since as far as they knew, totems required either blood or death, and absorbing or making life was \*right\* out, given how the green orbs seemed to universally come from creatures that were under direct dungeon operation, and also very lethal.

[+1.2 Skill Ranks : Programming - C++]

[Local Area Shift : +3 Couches]

“...I don’t…” Someone in the silent group said after Virgil announced the upgrade. “I don’t understand.”

Reed glanced at the board where he’d copied Lily’s reading on the orb. “Power Unit Type : Authority. Operation Time : 102 hrs/1K. Contains traces of : Comfort, Space, Leather”.

They waited around for a bit, before Nikhail ran back into the room. “Found em!” He panted out, leaning on one of the desks and not paying attention as a nervous researcher carefully moved an experiment away from his hand. “They… hoof… they’re all in little alcoves that didn’t exist before. One’s upstairs, the other two are down here.”

116 covid-19 = no go

“Thing is, a lot of our magic is very personal.” Deb spread her hands in front of her. “Skill orbs are a large percentage of it, and they’re basically all instantly ruled out. And yes, that \*does\* include medical ones. I know you’ve started thinking of me as the team doctor, but you should know there’s at least three other people who have high level immunology, biology, or surgery orbs walking around. And \*none of that is helpful\*, because applying those toward large scale help requires you join or form a large scale organization. We don’t have the numbers to make one, and we certainly can’t deploy people to join others because they’re going to have bizarre gaps in credentials.”

117 orbs for newbies

The Armory was a project that was absolutely working out just fine without James’ input, but he still kept up on it. The general idea was that they should have a box of ‘upgrades’ in various flavors, that was exactly the right size to copy completely with the projector. The kind of thing that could be used to bootstrap a new member of the order into someone at least a little bit equipped for delving, until they could get their own unique abilities. So far, they had the purple orb for memory, a red orb for courage, and a trio of yellows for running, trauma response, and apparently now quarterstaves. Alanna wanted to add a book from the School, James wanted to add a gun bracelet, and Anesh wanted to add Ganesh, though all of those were still being discussed. Mostly with Ganesh.

117 order (real world) -> basement (research) -> green orb

Which is why it was \*weird\* that the space was now \*much\* more open. The area stretched up twenty feet or so, there was a domed ceiling, and overhead, a railing jutted out of the mezzanine that looked down over the elevator doors. A tight spiral staircase in the corner led up to the overlooking walkway.

The materials were all the same as the rest of the basement; concrete, exposed PVC pipe, and rebar. But it had a certain elegance to it. And the whole thing was lit by strings of colored Christmas lights, currently being hung up en mass by someone on the upper balcony.

“Sorry!” Alanna called down to him. “This one was my fault!”

“Why.” James called back. “What was wrong with our cramped, dark, artless hallway okay I’ll shut up.” She bellowed a laugh, and even the camraconda hissed out his people’s version of humor.

“Green orb.” Alanna called down. “Already recorded in the database. Plus one balcony.”

“Is this one of the ones that Anesh copied?” James asked. “Because I can see that getting out of hand \*fast\*. Like, we’ll be more dungeon geometry than building, after a few of those.”

Alanna rattled her colorful light bushels at him. “It’d look awesome! But no, this was one of mine, and since we don’t have the time or resource to copy \*every\* orb, I figured I’d fire it off. It… I mean, it’s not \*bad…” She sounded kinda dejected.

119 high school dungeon = (orbs but books)

“Um… I found a book?”

“What?” James glanced over.

“It just appeared in the corner over here. One of the filing cabinet drawers was open, and this thing just popped out and jammed it? When I took it, the drawer slammed closed and it won’t open now.” She demonstrated, and the drawer flashed a green ‘one’ at them. “Is it… is it important?”

“Sarah.” James said, handing it to her. “Alanna and I both have one, and I don’t wanna find out now that stacking them is a bad idea. You’re up.”

She nodded, dusting off her knees as she got up, helping Lua up alongside her. “We should fall back to Nate before we move for the breach.” She said as she took the book. “Get these kids out of here.” Sarah opened the book. The room filled with the sensation of pages turning, and learning occurring. And then, the whole thick tome crumbled to dust in her hand, the specks of crumbled paper and leather vanishing from reality the same way they came in.

[Lesson Begun : Sex Ed 0/100]

121 orbs overall + blues

“Okay.” Anesh took a deep breath, and checked his own notes. “So, first off, orbs. Still not sure what the trigger is, whether it’s time in the Office or candy bars eaten, or whatever, but long term delvers are all consistently manifesting the ability to absorb more and more orbs of different colors. There’s also absolutely something about mindset in there, too, because Dave’s growth in that regard has stalled, even though he started out with more ‘slots’, and some people, like Alex, now have four goddamn blues at a time.”

125 orange orbs + dungeon book

And while he was doing that, the rest of the Order was making progress too. Alex and Neil independently figured out how to internalize orange orbs. And while it wasn’t really combat applicable, being able to break bricks to get a mountain bike, or read a book to spawn six kilograms of steel, were both practical in different ways. Though the book-based task had instantly drawn a crowd of people debating what, exactly, counted as a “book”, before Neil had pointed out that there \*was\* a stated requirement that the book be at least fifty two pages long, and everyone got mad at him for not just saying that before the hour long philosophical discussion.

END BOOK 2