“The trick to being prolific is to lower your standards.” -Catboy Slim-

  _____

  James sat with Sarah at a sushi place near the Lair, the two of them trying with varying degrees of success to will themselves dry as they eyed the tiny plates sliding by on the belt in front of them. He’d had some time around when normal humans had lunch, and James had figured he’d poke Sarah and see if she’d be interested. And she was! And they’d had an excellent little walk out of the dilapidated zone of urban decay around the Lair and into the more lively gooey core of businesses that had sprung up a half mile away.

  The fact that it had started raining halfway through their walk wasn’t anyone’s fault. But it was a hell of a way to start his October.

  “Ooooh, poke!” Sarah grabbed a small bowl and twirled her personal pair of chopsticks. “There’s another one if you want it!”

  ”I have a hard time with most raw fish actually.” James said as he applied a weapons-grade quantity of imitation wasabi to a California roll. His friend scrunched up her face at him, opening her mouth wider than needed to chomp down on the cube of tuna into her mouth as she gave him a silent challenging glare. “The texture gets to me!” James defended himself.

  Sarah smiled around her bite as she leaned her shoulder into his from her adjacent stool. “I knooooow. I was actually just curious if you’d changed at all. We’ve done this before, but it was a long time ago, and… you changed a lot.” Not in a bad way either. New-James was almost a different person, but everything that made James a good person was still there. Just polished, carved, and more radiant.

  ”I am willing to wager that you did too.” James pointed out. He refused to be morose today about what they’d lost; the weather was gloomy enough, he didn’t need to add to it. “Actually, you can get away with lying to me about basically anything, now that I think about it. Hang on, has that ever happened?”

  His friend’s grin took on a mischievous hint. “I may have overrepresented just how many lunches you owed me.” She said, puffing out her cheeks.

  James puffed out a laugh through his nose as he chewed, which did a great job of letting the wasabi claw its way up his sinuses. “I’d buy you lunch every day for the rest of our lives.” He told her plainly.

  ”Yeah that’s why it’s funny.” Sarah said as she snagged something that looked like a small green tentacle monster had shed its outer shell, but that the menu informed James was actually seaweed salad. “So what’s up with you? I mean what’s really up?”

  ”What, I can’t just want to go on a walk and talk about memes and dumb world news and stuff?” James asked innocently.

  ”Well…” Sarah almost bought his act. “You can’t, no! Not anymore! I think it’s ‘cause you find the magic too interesting to not talk about.”

  James flicked his eyes to the side where a couple quiet young people in black shirts with the restaurant’s logo on them were on their phones behind the cash register. Ostensibly there to help guests, he was normally pretty comfortable talking about magic with random people around, but right now he was planning to segue into something a bit more serious. “I do love it.” He agreed with a small nod as he watched some kind of maki with some kind of obviously spicy sauce on it roll by with a curious gaze. “Though in my defense, you clearly do too.”

  ”I do! But… what are you pointing at?” Sarah glanced over her own shoulder at where James was blindly aiming his index finger. She didn’t see anything, so her head turned into a rapid scanner as she panned across the restaurant from her seat, one hand struggling to grab the plate she’d been aiming for as her chopsticks rested in her other. “Is it something serious?”

  Her voice was tense enough that James quickly regretted being too cryptic. “No, no! Sorry! I was pointing at your chopsticks.” Hers were fancy, especially in contrast to the rough disposable wood ones that James had failed to break apart properly.

  ”What about them?” Sarah brought her hand around, fingers twisting to actually grab the utensils.

  ”That!” James laughed openly. “You’re doing tricks with what I am assuming are magnetic chopsticks, that you must have bought for this specific purpose!”

  Sarah flushed red, but she also let the chopsticks slide down until the tips tapped into one of her empty plates, her fingers hovering two inches over the ends of the metal rods, the control over magnetism that she had keeping the chopsticks in place like they were balancing standing up. “Noooooo.” Her voice dipped up and down as she defended herself. “I just had these! But I am doing that. I actually…” She paused, then took a deep breath and nodded mostly to herself. “We got chopsticks at the same time, actually.” Sarah said as she turned to look at James. “You, me, Alanna, Anesh. JP and Dave abstained for goofball reasons, and Mia already had some, but we were all out at a birthday dinner, and the four of us bought a set of really good chopsticks that we split up. You probably still have yours.”

  The memory was painful, but only because it wasn’t shared. What had been hurting Sarah, what had been tearing her apart bit by bit every time some stray memory hit her thoughts, wasn’t what had happened. It was what had been lost. The connection was gone, the sensation of growing together was gone, and in its place was isolation.

  She’d told Lua about it during therapy recently. Opening up about something she’d been trying to hide even from herself. And the advice that she’d gotten, the obvious advice, was that if the problem was that the memories weren’t shared, she should share them.

  James didn’t exactly know what she was doing, but it didn’t even matter. Because the reason Sarah was friends with James in the first place was that his instincts for his friends were to be kind, to be engaged, and to play off whatever it was they were talking about. And that meant that she could tell him this, and he would effortlessly reach out, grab that old isolated echo, and make it alive and part of their connection again. ”Probably! I have never once cleaned out the kitchen drawers since we got you back, and we still live in the same place. My main concern is that you’d somehow steal my sushi if I had Sarah-controllable chopsticks.”

  Sarah stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, and flicked her fingers forward, shooting her chopsticks at James’ plate and the last piece of sushi roll there. Her plan was to twist the magnetic field like so, grab it, and then pull her chopsticks back. But while Sarah could do an excellent impression of a railgun, her fine control on the return was maybe a little lacking; and besides that, chopsticks kind of required a delicate touch that she hadn’t mastered.

  So she mostly just spiked James’ sushi, and then yoinked it back to impact her sweatshirt.

  ”My plan has failed.” Sarah said, face a carefully falsified stoic mask as she caught the sushi roll and gingerly set it on one of the empty plates with her thumb and forefinger.

  ”You loon.” James wasn’t even mad, he just replaced his ‘stolen’ food with another of the endless parade of options. “Maybe I can get nice wooden chopsticks and you can have my other pair as a backup.” He tapped the counter. “And also I promise not to warn Alanna about your planned heist.”

  ”Ooh, I like this plan.” Sarah felt a wash of relief, her friend’s easy way of making everything a joke doing exactly what he wanted it to; turning the hard parts of life into something to cherish. “Anyway. If you’re done spilling eel sauce on yourself-“

  ”Hey! You were-“

  ”-then why not let me in on what you’re really thinking?” Sarah knew James better than James probably knew himself. She knew when he had something to say, and she wanted him to get to it while they were sitting here listening to the rain beat on the windows and not when they had to run back to the Lair.

  James went quiet, chopsticks deftly dipping a morsel of rice and crab into sauce before he shoved the whole thing in his mouth like he’d been starving. Sarah gave him space to think, not so much watching him as she was just aware of his presence at her elbow, aware that he was staring at the far wall and giving his brain time to find a starting point.

  ”I had a thought today.” He said slowly.

  Saran nodded eagerly. “This is my favorite way your things start.” She admitted as she sorted their empty plates by color into a stack. “This is how you say things when you know they’re a big deal.”

  Her friend’s mouth pulled up in a half smile. ”Correct.” James said. “Also I’m lying. It was more like a series of thoughts. Come with me on this journey.” He took a deep breath. “Remember fighting Blitzkrieg?”

  “…yes.” Sarah didn’t really like that memory. Some people might be proud of their combat ability or the damage they could inflict on a living person. Or at least, like her girlfriend was, proud of using their strength to protect others. But Sarah just remembered that day as a series of violent encounters, blood and splinters and squeals as she’d cut through ratroaches on the way into the dungeon, culminating in blowing a woman in half with her magnetized wooden spikes.

  Not that it had done anything. Blitzkrieg had still nearly killed her after being hit. She had killed Virgil and Cold-Wind-Friction, and it was likely the only reason she hadn’t taken out everyone else was that she was distracted or bored.

  ”Well.” James cut off the spiral. “We’ve got a few other pillars for comparison now. You know what was weird about Blitz?” He ignored the incredulous look Sarah gave him, his friend cocking her head back as she used his own tactic back at him and turned this into a joke. “Yeah yeah, I know. Shaddup.” James laughed. “Anyway. She was… limited. Really limited, right?”

  Sarah thought about the pillar. Thought about the sensation of someone pointing a loaded gun at her head that had been the primary feeling throughout the whole encounter. “Pointing. Not firing.” She said out loud, voice quiet so the employee looking their way didn’t overhear.

  ”What?”

  ”She was threatening. But she wasn’t just killing us.” Sarah said in her hushed tone.

  James grimaced, but nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. And she was using the kid… using Graham… to mess with the dungeon. Because I assume she couldn’t.” He shook his head and moved away from that specific name. “The dungeon thing matters I think. Because we have other examples; Lloyd couldn’t enter Townton, the Right Person had to come visit me in a dream at the same time, and now we’ve got Kiki telling us that dungeons feel like they’re hostile to her.”

  ”It does seem like they’ve got a secret weakness, yeah.” Sarah agreed. “But that’s not what you’re thinking.”

  ”I mean, it’s part of what I’m thinking!” James gave a laugh that was less lighthearted than he wanted. He considered taking more sushi, but the conversation was ruining his appetite. “Alright, here’s the rest. The Sewer started turning the high school it lives under into a dungeon. The Horizon was spawning life across most of Townton. And we know, or at least are pretty fucking sure, that the Underburbs are physically expanding in Missouri.”

  ”Which is freaky and bad and other mean words.” Sarah clicked her chopsticks on the counter. “Should we be… I don’t know, stealing Missouri in advance? So we can cut off whatever is happening?”

  ”Yes.” James said. “But Karen says we don’t have the budget to teleport a whole state. I know, I’m disappointed too.” They shared a sigh at the nature of financial constraints. “Point is, dungeons can expand. And dungeons can contract too, when we… I mean, when we reclaim the space they’ve occupied, right?”

  ”Right. We never really talked about… about Townton. About why the dungeon did what it did.” Sarah glanced at James. “Or about how it got that far out of its fancy road gate.” She added.

  James’ smile twitched. “Mh hm.” He knew she probably saw where he was going with this. “I… I want to ask you a favor.” He said. “A big one. Because it’s not really a favor, it’s more like I want you to do a dangerous job and I’m asking as a paladin and not as your friend.” He focused his stare forward, watching the hypnotic dance of tiny plates of sushi as he spoke. “So feel free to tell me to fuck off.”

  ”I’ll do it using nicer words, but okay.” Sarah nodded. “Go for it.”

  ”I want you to stop casually brainstorming, and start actually trying different things to get Clutter Ascent to expand to our apartment’s new security-deposit-destroying attic.” James told her. “I want… I want to know what exactly makes a dungeon form new entrances, breach its boundary, and claim territory. And I want you to find a way to do it on command. Ideally, I also want Clutter to consent to it as a person, but we don’t even know if dungeons are people, even if we’re definitely anthropomorphizing it. Her. Them?”

  ”I’ve been going with her, but I’m probably biased.” Sarah rolled the smooth cup of still hot green tea that she’d gotten in her hands, considering what James was asking. “So you think the dungeons are dangerous for pillars. Dangerous dangerous. I mean, that would explain why they always seem to be trying to kill them!” She gave a nervous laugh. “And… and you want to see if a dungeon can kill them back.”

  James really didn’t. But he would, if it was what it took to stop something like Blitzkrieg. “If nothing else, I want to have a backup plan for Kiki.” He said. “I want to introduce her to the Attic anyway, if you think Clutter could handle trying that. If you don’t want to expand Clutter yet, if you think we should wait, then I’ll back you up on that. Sarah I trust you way more than myself, okay? I’m looking for a contingency plan that might not even work. This doesn’t have to be-“

  ”Nah, I got this.” Sarah said with sudden confidence. “You get… the way your brain works… hey can I be mean for a second? I promise I don’t hate you.”

  “What a suspiciously specific thing to clarify.” James said deadpan. “Go ahead.” He had a joke about Sarah already being mean by stealing his sushi lined up, but he was too nervous about what he’d asked of her, and more nervous about her response.

  Sarah leaned over sideways, whispering conspiratorially. “You,” she told him, “are way too hard on yourself.” Sarah said before leaning back.

  ”Oh no.” James couldn’t help himself from joking a little bit; Sarah just drew that out of him. “I could hear the part where you almost swore at me. That means it’s bad!”

  ”It is bad you dummy!” Sarah’s voice had a bite to it that wasn’t common for her, and actually did pull James up short. “You think you have to do everything! You’re so convinced that half the people in your life will fall apart if you’re not helping them or keeping them safe that you burn yourself out overworking! But that’s not the worst part!”

  ”Really? Cause when you lay it out like that it sounds bad.” James grimaced.

  The chastisement continued undelayed. ”The worst part is that it makes you baby everyone.” Sarah’s eyes tracked James’ hand as he took a small plate, and as soon as he set it down, she snapped away one of the gyoza he was planning to stress eat, biting it in half almost as a threat as she spoke. “You’re so worried about hurting people. About hurting me. And I understand, because of course I understand you goober. But you get so caught up in it that you’re panicking about the ethics of things that aren’t bad!”

  James frowned as he fended off her attempt to steal the other piece of fried food, shoving it into his mouth in self defense and chewing rapidly before speaking. “But I am asking something bad of you. I’m asking you to weaponize a person.”

  ”You’re asking me to prepare a way to protect.” Sarah said with a quiet voice that belied the simple drama of her statement. “We both know that, if someone’s prediction is accurate, we don’t have an especially long time before the world starts to get bad, and-“

  ”Within one year eight months, going off Nick’s comment. Sorry, continue.” James never stopped keeping an eye on their doomsday clock.

  “-and you think Clutter would survive?” Sarah asked sadly. “You think I would? He didn’t say ‘things get bad’, and you know it. I’ve never talked to the Right Person, maybe he’s a bully, maybe he’s just the worst. But you don’t think he lied.”

  ”I don’t.”

  ”Is self defense wrong?” Sarah asked suddenly.

  James blinked. “No. Obviously not.”

  ”The first and last pillar I met killed two of my friends.” Sarah said, shifting aside as one of the servers came by to refill their water cups and not realizing or caring that she was sharing deeply concerning words as they passed. “I’m… I’m scared to go meet Kiki. I know you say she’s nice, but I don’t know if I can. And we already wanted to see if we could expand Clutter, right? You’re not even asking anything except for ‘hey Sarah, can you maybe tell me if you can do the thing quickly?’ and that’s just science!” She pointed a finger at him before tapping him on the nose. “Wizard science!”

  ”Not witch science?”

  ”No we know which science, I just told you, it’s wizard science.” Sarah paused with a bright grin across her face, waiting for James to register the pun before she shook her head. “Also Momo’s our witch, and I don’t want to step on any toes!”

  James sighed at the antics, shaking his head but still feeling a little lighter. Still. “I don’t know if it’s a good precedent to set that we develop dungeon weapons in case of future fights that might not happen.” He said.

  ”Are you arguing against your own request? Who taught you how to debate?!” Sarah’s smile froze briefly. “Nevermind, it was me. Now even I’m forgetting. Do you want my help or not?” She challenged her best friend in the world who was also a huge idiot sometimes.

  And James kinda sorta knew exactly what she was feeling. Deep in the subconscious part of him that had never really forgotten this human, was the echo of her unspoken words. That he was being dumb, second guessing himself for no reason, and that Sarah had seen this all before and would like it if he could maybe just be a little more confident in himself. Not the external confidence that he projected when he needed to be a paladin, but the real, almost tangible confidence of a person who trusted themself to do the right thing.

  ”Yeah.” James said. “I do. I have a bad feeling and I think it might save lives. But I don’t want to put you or Clutter at-“

  ”Great! Now, do you want sesame balls?”

  ”…I also want that, yes.”

  ”Yeah, I know you do.” Sarah set the bean paste dessert in front of him. “Also it’s going to stop raining in a minute, so if we eat these fast enough, we can pay and sprint back without getting soggy again!”

  ”How do you know that? Is there some kind of new atmospheric pressure sense purple orb? Or a barometer totem? Or… no, you’re giving me the look. I feel like this look has been used on me a lot in my life. It’s ‘phone’, isn’t it? You looked at the weather app.”

  Sarah beamed at her friend. “I did! But also the purple orb. We can get you one if you want, but I won’t help you if I’m soggy, so let’s finish up and stop talking about things that make the nice people here nervous!” Unlike James, she still felt self conscious about talking about the end of the world in public.

  Orb or app, Sarah’s timing was good enough that they made it back with about fifteen seconds to spare before the sky opened up and the rain came pouring back down. And by then, they’d started talking about a play Sarah wanted to see on the walk home, and James had forgotten both to pick up a copy of that orb, and also that he was terrified of turning into a monster that made weapons out of living people. Which was, to Sarah’s credit, her exact plan.

  They intended to split up when they got back, because both of them had stuff to do. Sarah to avatar practice, and James to a meeting about potions, both of them hoping that no one needed them outside until the rain stopped coming down, because as heavy as the rain was, the increasing wind made it seem even more dense and stormy outside as he hung his coat in the spatially compressed locker by the door. And James was secretly terrified that Nate was going to have him doing shooting drills in that.

  But Nate wasn’t here right now. So he said his goodbyes with Sarah, and they headed deeper into the Lair. Going the same direction, the grin on Sarah’s face growing with every step as she shadowed James’ movements perfectly.

  ”Are we going to actually the same place?” He asked rhetorically, trying not to laugh as Sarah started to break out in giggles.

  They weren’t, and their actual goodbye was one stairwell later. James kept moving, choosing to not use the elevator today as he descended into the basements. He gave people polite nods or friendly words of encouragement as he passed, giving a warm smile to a pair of new ratroaches who were heading to a doctor’s appointment, checking in on Rufus and Fredrick’s garden as he passed by the area, small little gestures of friendship. James knew that not everyone was always gonna be a nice person, but if he was, and he was all over the Lair all the time, then he could maybe try to ooze out an amount of good vibes.

  The alchemy department had a little open room where a bunch of the basement halls met up, and that was where James eventually ended up. Away from the main group of Researchers, and also conveniently away from whatever was making The Sound. The Sound was what James had decided to call the alarm-like buzzing that was happening over in the computer science section of their basement workspace. He was… not actually sure if it was fine or not, but everyone he’d checked with had told him not to worry, so he was fine waiting until after his talk to go check it out.

  The talk was, to everyone’s satisfaction, direct and to the point.

  “We’re on track with the steady upscaling of exercise potion,” James said as he sat at one of the basement tables with Red and Davis, “but I’d like to get more lung purifier out there while we have the opportunity. Have we figured out how to use Harvest Echo to get more sap from the pots?”

  ”What we have ‘figured out’,” Amelia said with dry distaste, “is that the succulents that grow from planted sap are particularly vulnerable to cold temperatures.”

  ”…that’s a no then.” James frowned, rubbing at his chin. “Okay. Did it mess with the production too? The cold, I mean.”

  Davis shook his head with the quick jerk that he used, which James would never admit out loud always made him wonder if the grey haired human was about to break his own neck. “Process Procession actually works fine because the sap itself doesn’t care, we just can’t kill the plants. It took a while to figure out how to make use of it, but it does work. The problem is just that it costs eight Breath, so it’s not really something we can industrialize.”

  ”No sweatshop assembly lines down here. Unfortunately.” Red said, the woman shaking her head like she’d been hoping.

  James ignored that, and also ignored his own joke about how of course there were no sweatshops if everyone was freezing. “Okay, I’d like to set up to expand to keep up with internal demand. I know we’ll never meet external…”

  ”We might.” Davis commented. “I hear the Motoric might have copying spells?”

  ”Theory and guesses.” Amelia snorted in a somehow dignified way.

  James clicked his tongue. “Yeah, she’s right. We think they can duplicate spellbooks, maybe books in general, or maybe there’s just repeat drops. But no new bigger copy ritual, sorry.” He shrugged, emitting big ‘whatcha gonna do about it’ energy. “We’re still adding more pots though.”

  ”I want to say we should be making even more.” Davis said, making a professional request as he tipped his hand up on the table. “I know I was outvoted, and I know we’re a little biased here, but the potions are one of our most repeatable, distributable, and improveable sections. And our limit right now is still sap production.”

  It was a fair point, and James kind of agreed, but Davis was right. They had been outvoted. “I’ll keep an eye out for other options, how about that?” James asked.

  ”You could keep an eye out for foolishness.” Red ‘suggested’. “If you put a stop to idiot Researchers trying to grow shaper substance, perhaps we could lose fewer pots to ‘testing’?” It wasn’t really a question, her acerbic words practically slicing the air apart as she spoke.

  Unaware of what had actually happened, James tried to look it up as fast as possible, and found one of those impossible to ignore warnings in the relevant file. Apparently shaper substance would start mutating the succulent as soon as it began growing inside it, and within ten minutes of that happening, either the plant melted into a puddle of inert sludge, or it grew so fast it ripped the pot apart and then died because it wasn’t sustained by the magic anymore. James was almost annoyed they’d tested something so dangerous, but the list of precautions that had been taken was longer than he’d ever seen, so he decided to trust them for now. He also decided to change the topic to something safer. “So. Have you two seen the new aerosolizer masks?” He asked

  ”I have. They look absurd.” Red commented as she took the out with a roll of her eyes and a tap of the toe of her shoe on the hardwood floor that was present in this part of the basement for some reason. “I do not understand why our engineering team designed them to look that way, but I am certain they are inefficient.”

  James laughed. ”Oh, that’s easy. They didn’t.” He got a single raised eyebrow between the two of them by way of response. “We’ve got some smart people here, and I know there’s more than a handful of skill orbs in rotation for making someone sartorially inclined, but no one here actually has the experience or magic to make form fitting potion dispensing face masks.” Not yet anyway. “So I outsourced it.”

  ”…to whom?” Red asked him curiously.

  Now raising his own eyebrows, Davis crossed his arms and picked at the sleeves of his jacket. “I’m having a hard time imagining someone having the right mix of skills for that. Unless… did you just send a design to a factory? Is that an option?”

  ”It might have been! But no, I just got a cosplay creator to do it. Paid them a lot, but it’s fair because they do great work, even if it’s a bit slow. We’ve got about eight of them for specific people, and I wanted to check on what potions work best with them and can be dosed that way for short bursts of use.”

  ”Hardening, incorporeality, sprinting, and paralytic secretion.” Red answered instantly. “In order from most to least useful.”

  ”What was that last one?” James kept up on the potion project more than anything else, and he hadn’t heard of that development.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Davis sighed. “It’s new. Makes skin secrete a paralytic toxin that causes paralysis in most things with a nervous system. And it makes you immune to it, too, right up until the exact moment that it stops, and then…”

  ”And then you’re covered in deadly neurotoxin. Right.” James held up a hand before he’d even finished talking. “I’m sorry, I’m referencing a thing, I know it’s not that. Anyway, would you guys mind having someone in your department set up the first three and only the first three in the masks?”

  ”I’ll put Bea on it. The girl needs something to do.” Red almost sighed but clearly stopped herself. “Well, no, she doesn’t. We’re short handed down here right now. Half my foolish assistants are missing for some reason.”

  ”It’s not ‘some reason’.” Davis said with the kind of voice a man who had been having the same argument for several weeks used. “It’s the pillar. Who I still want to meet, mind you.”

  ”Yeah, sorry, you’re on the list of people she specifically asked not to meet.” James said. And then as Davis started complaining, he voiced the preplanned interception Kiki had given him. “Because she’s afraid - correctly as far as we can tell - that her aura works most strongly on people who have spent a lot of their life being unkind, but are actively trying to change. Because she knows a lot about everyone who’s part of the Order, to a creepy degree, yes, I agree. And because she doesn’t want to influence you.” Davis opened his mouth again, an angry scowl forming around his eyes, and James kept talking. “Yes, I am aware that change is the point. Yes, I told her that. No, she was not swayed by my genius rhetoric. And yes, Amelia, I am aware that she’s a bigger hypocrite than I am, thank you.”

  ”Now how in the goddamn did you know I was-“

  ”I’ve had this conversation six times, and three of them were with people like you.” James answered, exasperated.

  “No one’s quite like her.” Davis said with a twitch of a grin. “I don’t suppose there’s any choice but to accept that, huh?”

  James tsked in frustration. “For now. Maybe forever. I dunno, working with Kiki has been hard for everyone, especially her. She’s terrified of herself, and the more Research figures out about the reach of what she can do, the more I kinda get it.” He shook his head. “That’s not what I’m here for though. I’m here to ask how things are going identifying ‘alchemical neutral’.”

  The two Researchers sighed in unison in the kind of way that James knew personally from his time in college being asked to answer a question where a Red Bull-fueled all-nighter had produced the answer of ‘I know less now than I did yesterday’. It was kind of endearing that they both did it, too; the emotion of spending time researching and studying only to end up behind where you started apparently being a universal human emotion.

  Amelia twisted the simple gold bracelet on her wrist as she answered with more or less what James expected. “It seemed like the most basic place to start. And yet all our sap ration for experimentation for two weeks has turned up nothing.”

  ”That’s not true.” Davis corrected politely. “It’s turned up that our experiments don’t work.” He said it cheerfully enough, but there was a hint of annoyance under the calm exterior that the man kept up all the time.

  The experiment in question was to verify something that had been noticed only after hundreds of different scattershot tests to make new potions had found a strange thing happening. Sometimes, it seemed, ingredients did nothing. Alchemical neutral, they were calling it. And once it was noticed, the obvious course of action was to shift all their current experiments from finding new tools to building a better foundation for doing that finding.

  So take a potion that was well known. Like, say, the exercise potion. And then make a batch, adding an ingredient. If the potion fails, then you know that ingredient isn’t neutral, because clearly it did something. If it works exactly as expected, then you know whatever you added doesn’t engage with alchemy. And so, in the long run, time is saved by keeping the potion department - James refused to call it Reagent, even though he really really wanted to let his intrusive thoughts win - from using stuff that was literally doing nothing.

  The problem was simply that it hadn’t worked. Dozens of tests, and nothing they had added had done nothing. Also all of them had caused the output to be worse in every way, possibly dangerously so, so they hadn’t even really improved the potion, and James gave voice to that concern.

  “Oh. We actually have managed against all sane logic to improve the recipe.” Red told him with a tired shake of her head. She delivered that news like it was normal, and James had definitely wanted more information. Which, at least, she was more than willing to provide. “It was the paper. Well, the textbooks. The way my old guild did things, you have to understand, we had one fruit a day. One. For a dozen of us to share, and to turn into profit? There was some competition.” The woman set her hand on her chin, staring off to the side as she spoke. “So when we found something that worked, we took it. Face value was the only value that mattered. Of course we could have solved the puzzle, but why bother? There was no competition, and no one would pay more than our too-high prices regardless.”

  ”I’m not sure…” James cocked his head, trying to figure out where this was going.

  ”It wasn’t the textbooks.” Davis explained in simple terms. “It was the ink. The reason we had to use older textbooks - not that there was a shortage or anything, Goodwill was pretty happy to see us walk off with them - is because they’re all printed before a law that banned a certain ink.”

  ”…what kind of ink.” James already knew the answer. He shook his head abruptly, interrupting the reply. “No, nevermind, it’s super toxic, isn’t it? Are the exercise potions gonna kill me if I keep using them?”

  Davis shook his head reassuringly. ”No, it’s a harmless dose.”

  Red had a different view. “Unless you’re over the age of forty, have a liver problem, or are allergic to mercury.”

  ”Everyone’s allergic to-!”

  ”That last one was a joke.” She took a deep breath. “You can look forward to less thick potions. Oh, this does indicate our singular success, in case you were at all curious.”

  James snapped his fingers. “The paper.” He got it instantly. If they removed the paper but not the ink, that mean that at least was some form of neutrality in the ingredient. “How did-“

  ”We tried it in three other potions and they all failed.” Red stated with a dead stare. “So it’s not the paper.”

  ”So it’s something else then.” James hummed as he drummed his fingers on the table they were meeting at. “But clearly ingredient related. Some kind of limit to the number of discrete things that can be added? No, that doesn’t track with at least three other recipes.” The two older humans watched him with silent curiosity as he stood up and paced behind his chair, rubbing his chin as he talked to himself. “We make these in a clean room so it’s not likely contamination, but we can’t rule it out in the ingredients themselves. But college textbooks from 1970 aren’t gonna be clean, so that’s probably out too. And the sap is clearly operating on a kind of semi-human conceptual level, since it’s treating the ink and paper as separate things, but not, like, the elements composing them. But when they’re together, it ignores the… paper…” He frowned suddenly, staring at the floor.

  Red spoke quietly out of the side of her mouth to Davis. “Does he do this a lot?”

  ”Your guess is as good as mine. I see him as often as you do.” He replied in his gentleman’s voice. “James, are you-“

  ”Combinations.” James said, looking up abruptly. “Oh, sorry. Uh. What’s the potion we have with the fewest ingredients? Skin care or hand grenade, right? Those… both suck for this. Hm.”

  ”You have a theory?” Red’s voice held an edge to it. In a lot of ways, she was still intently jealous of the fact that many of the others in Research who worked around her on different projects had an intuition she still lacked. But her work took priority to petty human feelings, and when someone like James, who spent half his life in dungeons, said he had a thought? She listened, and she listened closely.

  James took a breath and shrugged. “I have an idea. I’m wondering if, between this, the fact that we don’t have a good way to know what adding anything to a potion will do, and the times that ingredients were found to be neutral… maybe it’s not ingredients that have effects. Maybe it’s combinations. Maybe just of ingredients, maybe also of methods? But if it is…”

  Davis caught on quickly. ”If it is, that explains why our tests failed. We’d be looking for what one addition did, but it would be making as many changes as other things it combined with.” He shared a look with Amelia. “Can we start making a reference sheet for this?” He asked.

  Red, who had gotten several skill ranks in various mathematics and logistics skills over the late week, gave a sharp smile. “We can work something out.” She said, standing up and deciding the meeting was over because she had work to get to. “I’ll have the doses for your masks prepared and in the armory. And if this works, I’ll even give you a real thank you.”

  ”…You know, from most people, that would be kinda insulting.”

  ”And from Red?” Davis asked as he stood and offered James a ‘thank you for your time’ handshake, which the paladin returned.

  ”Oh, still insulting. But she’s already gone and I think we both know she’s more interested in curing the common cold than placating anyone around her.” James laughed, and Davis smiled at him before he followed in Amelia’s wake.

  James shook his head as he left the little break room zone outside the alchemy labs that felt a little more like something Officium Mundi would make than any human. And hell, maybe it had; this whole basement existed as a result of a green orb. It was likely that the counter, sink, fridge, and at least half the tables here did too.

  The quick conversation hadn’t taken much time. And the reality of the situation was that it wasn’t especially necessary. There was a reason the Order put everything they knew on their servers with a tagging system that was the most enforced arbitrary structure they had in the place. And if that wasn’t enough, there was a constant conversation over text chat, even if it did move slowly sometimes. But there was just something about facing a person and speaking that led to more fluid information sharing. And sometimes, inspiration.

  “Well, if it pays off.” James said with a sigh as he stretched and looked toward one of the halls that led out of here. There were a few; this place was kind of an intersection, and the basement was becoming a warren of obscure intersecting halls and tunnels no matter how many times he demanded they put maps up. Someone, at least, was learning to navigate down here. And James felt like he should have a word with the girl who’d been listening in on their conversation from around the corner.

  He’d spotted Emma on the way in; she wasn’t following him exactly, but she was going the same direction. Zhu was taking a week-long nap at the moment, so James had gone for an alternate approach to watching the teenager lagging behind him; tapping into the Lair’s webcam that was watching the Ceaseless Stacks tablet in the room just around that corner, which happened to have a view through the door’s window of half of Emma’s body lurking.

  She didn’t look like she was armed, but she was definitely stalking someone. And James was pretty sure he knew who, just as he knew that Emma’s magic would let her become armed at a moment’s notice if she had the right spell prepared. So he decided to cut this off before things got any further.

  “Oh… hi?” Emma said as James rounded the corner that she was about to peek around, and stopped in front of her. “Uh… I just need to get past, and…”

  ”Nope.” James said, crossing his arms. “You’re stalking Amelia, and I need you to back off.” He tried to not sound angry, but the way Emma looked like she knew she was doing something wrong, and still tried to - badly - bluff her way past him just kinda rankled.

  If Emma had seemed defensive before, she got angry at James’ words really fast. “What do you know? You’re not in charge of where I go!”

  James steadied himself, and let her words splash off his invincible defense of keeping his arms crossed and giving her a level look. “Let’s sit.” He said. “You can tell me what’s going on.” He jerked his head toward the same table he’d just been at, walking back over and noting through two expanded forms of vision that Emma followed. Though she did stare at the chair for a while before eventually dragging it across the floor with a squeal and sitting stiffly. “So.” James said. “Want to tell me, or should I take a guess?”

  “Are you spying on us?” Emma asked with the kind of indignation that James often drew on when he had his own negative encounters with authority figures.

  ”No, though should I be?” He cocked an eyebrow at her.

  ”I wasn’t going to do anything.” Emma said, retreating into herself as she twisted in the chair.

  James watched the human girl for a few seconds, before sighing and letting his voice soften. “You are in the process of doing something.” He reminded her.

  ”I’m just… waiting.” Emma said, defensive energy at full power. “I’m allowed to be here.”

  ”Technically.” James nodded. “But bad faith arguments don’t work on me. You’re stalking Amelia. That is something. And I need to make sure that you aren’t going to hurt anybody. Either someone else, or yourself.”

  ”Myself?!” Emma had been prepared to give James a silent glower until he left her alone, but that accusation pried a deep anger out of her. “You think I’d-“

  ”I think you’re spending your morning following a sixty two year old woman who you hate, and you’re either planning or fantasizing about revenge.” James said as calmly as he could, doing an excellent job of keeping himself from letting anything hostile come through. “You are hurting yourself already, even if you didn’t think of it that way.”

  Emma went still, eyes widening before she jerked and refused to meet James’ gaze. Instead she looked at anything else in the otherwise empty break room space. “I wasn’t going to hurt her.” She spat.

  “Not yet. Not this time.” James said quietly. “But you were thinking about it. About what she deserves. About what you could do. Maybe you were thinking that you know it’s wrong, so you won’t actually do anything, but what if…” She still didn’t meet his eyes, but he didn’t look away or fidget, just providing a calm presence for her. “That kind of thing doesn’t feel good, does it?”

  ”No.” Emma eventually admitted. She didn’t say anything else, but James didn’t press the conversation. He just nodded, and sat there, waiting for her. Like he expected something. “She killed my best friend.” She said, feeling pathetic as she did. Like it was an excuse or something.

  James just nodded. “Yeah. She did. Or her organization did. Ultimately, Amelia is partly responsible. So’s Nile, really.”

  Emma hadn’t actually expected an agreement. “So why’s she still here?” She asked. “She’s evil, she doesn’t deserve…” she sat forward, waving a hand at the Lair. “This. Aren’t you supposed to be good guys?”

  ”I like to think so.” James smiled without raising his voice or changing his tone.

  ”So get rid of her! Or put her in jail or something!”

  The look that James gave her was so sad that it almost cut through the righteous fury that Emma had built up from a combination of a desire for revenge and a mostly successful self-brainwashing regimen. “Because she killed your friend?”

  ”She didn’t just kill her! Brit’s corpse is still walking around! Do you know how gross that is? To see someone you used to know, but they’re a monster now?!” Emma yelled at him. “And you won’t do anything!”

  ”I’ve killed people’s friends too.” James said gently, and Emma froze, staring at him. The teenager completely unprepared for that blunt admission. “I like to think I’ve avoided killing in anger, that it’s always been defensive. But I’ve still done it.” He took a long breath. “I know it’s not the same, if you were thinking that.” Emma had been, yeah. “But I’m trying to be better. And so’s Amelia. We’re just working from different places.”

  Emma didn’t really want to hear it. “What do you even want?” She asked James, trying to deflect the conversation back on him with a fumbling stab at emotional manipulation.

  But James just took the question and broke her attempt to make him feel bad by giving an honest answer. “I want you to grow up without feeling afraid or powerless. I want everyone to be able to be better tomorrow than they are today. And I want to get rid of the idea that if we kill all the bad people, then the world will only have good people left in it.” He spread his hands on the table. “What do you want?” He turned the question around on her.

  And because he’d been honest with her, and had actually listened, Emma at least tried to give him a real answer. ”Liam wants to forget everything that happened and have a normalish life. Luc- Uh, Lincon wants to be a superhero I think. But I don’t know what I want.” It felt so freeing to say that. “I just… it hurts so much when I see her here. And I just thought… I thought I could… do something. Or maybe there’s a way to get Brit back, or something.” She covered her face with a sleeve, soaking up the tears before the older human sitting on the other side of the table could see them.

  ”Yeah.” James sighed. “I get that.”

  ”How?!”

  ”You think I haven’t lost anyone?” He asked. “I had a friend who died so hard I can’t even remember them. There’s just a hole. It sucks. So far, there hasn’t really been any end to how much it sucks.”

  ”Aren’t you supposed to be reassuring me that everything will be fine?” Emma had heard that line so much from her bishop that she kind of expected it as the standard hollow platitude.

  James snorted. “Fuck that.” He said, before remembering the conditioned aversion to profanity the kids in Emma’s group all had. “Things don’t just become fine. Fine takes work. But… look. If Red- if Amelia was still hurting people? I’d be right there with you on trying to stop her. But revenge for the sake of revenge? It’s not going to make you feel anything new. And we can solve the problem of you not running into her a lot easier than through murder.”

  ”And what about Brittany?” Emma asked. “Or does she just have to keep being trapped in that… that…”

  ”Ah.” James shook his head. “Okay, this one is weird, but… do you want to know something about the inhabitors?” Emma nodded slowly. “The original person isn’t… there. You talked to her, back when we first met, remember? Well, what she told you then is true. Your friend is gone. The person that lives in that body now wasn’t a willing participant in that event, and… and I think that’s a big part of the reason inhabitors avoid mirrors.” James had felt sick when he’d put that bit of psychology together. “Bea is as much a victim of the Alchemists as your friend Brittany was.”

  Emma didn’t look like she bought that. “But she’s a monster.”

  ”Because she’s not human?” James asked, and saw the way Emma faltered in her nod. Good, he thought, because breaking that thought loop was high on the priority for the Order’s interactions with all these kids. “Have you talked to her? Not to ask about your old friend, but just to get to know Bea.” Emma shook her head slowly. “You should try.” James said with a reassuring smile. “She’s… I mean… she’s new. And she’s learning what she wants too. And I’m not saying that she’s a replacement or a fix to anything. But it might help you understand better.”

  ”Because you want everyone to get along.” Emma challenged him, trying to hold onto the anger, but finding it slipping through her mental fingers.

  James smiled more openly. “I want that. I don’t think it’ll happen cause people suck sometimes too. But I’m going to do what I can to give people the chance.” He slowly stood up. “Do you want to talk to Bea?” He asked.

  ”…No.” Emma said with bitter teenage resentment. “…but I will.”

  ”Alright.” James said, turning to leave. “Wait there a second.” He said over his shoulder as he walked back around the corner to where his webcam accomplice was watching Bea stiffly lingering before entering the room and interrupting their conversation. “Go.” He told her directly, walking past the inhabitor as he made his way out of the alchemy department.

  ”But-“

  ”Go say hi.” James reiterated, shutting down his visual feed from the webcam, because something about the quality was making him nauseous as he walked. “No pressure.”

  He kept walking, turning a corner and just barely seeing Bea take a halting step into the room before he was out of sight. James let out a tense breath, feeling all the confidence and the false face of a composed individual drain away along with the pressure of the chat. He really hadn’t been prepared for that, and he hoped he’d done okay. But he needed to find something non-social to do for at least an hour. Maybe he could go restock on a couple Utah spells after the Officium Mundi delve he’d been on last night.

  The delve had been worth it, both concretely and in the abstract. A lot more mana coffee funneled into the duplication ritual that really was what kept the Order running, but also, a small green orb that gave a building an increase to how fast batteries recharged inside. It wasn’t a huge bonus, keeping with the size of the orb, but they’d made a number of copies and at least for parts of the Lair, something like getting one of the camraconda arm backpacks up to full charge only took fifteen minutes now. For a phone or laptop, even less.

  But James was tired physically from all the running, tired mentally from all the big picture planning, and tired emotionally from everything that had just happened. So he needed a break.

  Which was, of course, why he was currently wondering if he had time to dive into a side room and escape from Momo, who was approaching him with the kind of intense energy that she had when she was hyperfocused on a task. El trailed behind her, blonde braid bouncing haphazardly as she chased Momo in the middle of an argument that was clearly being ignored. “-just fucking do that! That’s insane! I’m not gonna just- James! James say no to whatever she asks!” El yelled at him.

  James sighed, clearly far too late to throw himself through a doorway and seal himself off. One of his hands dipped into a pocket and touched the edge of a prepared telepad, but he hesitated. He had promised Momo he’d be less of a dick about her work, especially since she’d clearly been making an effort to do things safer. And her quest to make an automatic Garden spell equipped was something that was admirable, especially if she could do it without doing to anyone’s brains what happened to that one guy in Scanners.

  So he waved at the two of them with his free hand as El closed the gap to a slowing Momo and grabbed at her. Which gave him a great view of the quartet of speckled-white folded bird wings coming out of El’s back. “Hey you two. Oh hey, nice wings El. You look… uh…” he wanted to say angelic but he had the sense that word would piss off the woman that was only kind of his friend. “Hhhhhot no fuck dammit.” James actually did not know why his mouth had filled in that word.

  ”Sure that’s fucking weird coming from you but thanks.” El said, gasping for breath as she clapped a hand over Momo’s mouth. “Say no to this idiot.” She commanded James.

  ”I feel like we never talk anymore.” James said idly. “You know we do Route delves still, right? You should come chauffeur me into peril sometime. There’s moose now!”

  “There’s always been moose, you just can’t talk about them to anyone who doesn’t know about the moose.” El told him bluntly. “Come on man, I’m asking nicely and Momo’s gonna get away from me. Just tell her no.”

  James sighed. “Look, this is funny and all, but I’ve kinda had a lot of draining conversations today.” His voice was heavy, and even Momo stopped writhing quite so aggressively as she wiggled out of El’s grasp. “I’m sure this is some funny antics or something, but I just… I’m not feeling it. Momo, can what you need wait?”

  Momo opened her mouth, and then froze before coughing and shuffling back, flicking the felt belt of her bathrobe back and forth nervously. “Uh… I mean… probably?” She clearly hadn’t expected to encounter sincerity and emotional overload so quickly out of the gate. “I mean I did kind of have a real request.”

  ”Alright, go for it.” James nodded, bracing himself.

  ”Can I have an exoskeleton?” Momo asked the question like a kid who knew their Christmas wishlist was way too aspirational.

  Lately, James had run into a specific feeling more than he ever had before. It was the sensation of going into a situation with a kind of scope of what he could expect, and then, whoever he was talking to just throwing a complete curveball at him.

  He was prepared for Momo to ask permission to base jump from their skyscraper office building, or authorization to see how many infomorphs she could fit inside her head. He had a kind of outside boundary to his list that stopped just past ‘hey James can I eat a dungeon core assuming they are a real thing’ and only slightly before ‘hey James I need you to kill someone for me’. But only because he figured Momo could handle her own murder if she needed to, and that really wasn’t her style anyway.

  It wasn’t like it was a sliding scale, more like an amorphous blob on a map of all possible topics. But wherever ‘exoskeleton’ was, it was in one of the spots that blob had never come close to covering.

  ”No?” Was the best pitiful utterance James could muster. “What? No. Why.”

  ”Yeah Momers, why?” El prompted hotly. “Why would you possibly need power armor?”

  ”Oh!” James slapped his forehead, exhaling in relief. “That kind of exoskeleton! Jesus, that’s so much easier.”

  Momo’s comical nod was almost a blur as she leaned back into El and let the taller girl yelp in panic before bracing her feet to keep Momo from falling over. “Yeah! I need more carrying capacity, so I figured I could get one of those fancy powered exoskeleton things the army was thinking of using for hauling stuff! Not, like, a shaper substance Kafkaization bug exoskeleton, and I see now how I could have said it better. Anyway. I need one?”

  ”Wow that answered basically no questions.” James said, shaking his head. “Also no? Those things are, like, ten thousand bucks and we have a purple orb for lifting strength.”

  ”No, that’s only arm strength, I need, like, to be able to shove a thousand pounds in a backpack.” Momo snapped the collar of her robe as she got into the conversation and then had to catch her balance when El let go of her.

  ”Yeah,” El said with clear annoyance painted on her face, “a thousand pounds of what? Go on, I bet James would love to know.”

  “I would.”

  Momo scratched the back of her head and looked at the concrete ceiling. “Compuuuuuter… stuff?”

  Increasingly James was not sure he wanted to know. But now he had to know. ”Why.”

  Steeling herself, Momo decided to just rip the bandaid off. ”Okay, so… you know how a while back I made that joke about how I had a caller ID totem and I was gonna deploy Response teams to just fuckin’ demolish anyone who tried to reach me about my car’s extended warranty?”

  The memory sounded like something Momo would do, so James nodded. ”I mean, I believe you, sure.”

  ”Weeeeell, Response is busy all the time, and a lot of people lack my vision. So, uh…”

  ”So this dumbass has been teleporting to random office rentals in India, Nigeria, and Florida, and fucking wrecking them.” El finished, the gentle arm she had set around Momo’s shoulders rapidly turning into a headlock. “And her question here is because she wants to steal more stuff at a time.”

  That sounded hilarious. But James felt like he was in the position of designated adult in this conversation, so he didn’t say that just yet. ”Wait, hang on.” He held up a hand. “More stealing?”

  Momo tried to nod, replying with a choked voice. “Oh, yeah! I’ve got, like… a few thousand smartphones, and a bunch of other computers. Cables. A minifridge. That kinda stuff. I keep them in a storage room down here!” She actually had a precise tally, because she was proud of her work, but this seemed like the wrong time to share that. “Anyway, the point is, it’s kind of a waste if I’m not-“

  ”Wait, wait, stop.” James rubbed a hand over his face, not allowing himself to enjoy the sensation of nothing hurting or being tender healing flesh as he did so. “You, Momo, you, have been tagging and disrupting phone scammers by warping to their offices, presumably while they’re there, and just grabbing anything you can? And storing all that here, in the Lair?”

  Momo made a derisive noise. “Please. I wait until local nighttime so no one’s around! Also I wipe everything before bringing it back just in case. Also I don’t just steal! I break anything I can’t carry!” She grinned and mimed swinging a baseball bat. Or tried to; she was hampered by El slapping her in the face with a twitch of an extended wing.

  ”Make her stop.” El said.

  ”Yeah, Momers, this is… uh…”

  ”Oh, what, are we pretending that I’m the bad guy in this one, and not the people whose day job is stealing boomers’ pensions?” Momo jerked her head back hard enough to force El away, straightening her spine and suddenly looking like an almost completely different version of herself. There was a moment of almost palpable anger rolling off her. “Fuck off. Both of you. This is the most obvious version of this game; they’re doing something that adds no value and just hurts people, and I’m removing their ability to do that.” Silence followed Momo’s statement, until she cleared her throat, slouched back to her normal posture, and added “And also stealing, like, a fucking lot of phones. Which I could do better with some kind of exoske-“

  James’ fingers tugged at the page of the telepad. Just a little bit at first, but then he considered the extent to which he was being hammered by emotional whiplash today, and he made his decision. “Hey, El, great to see you. We should catch up sometime. You can tell me how you walk around like that and don’t knock everything over; Cam’s keeping her method secret for some reason. Anyway!”

  ”No wait!” El’s shout was at the halfway point of pleading and pissed.

  It was too late, though. James was gone. Not even that far, either; he was just in his office ‘upstairs’. “Hey Rufus. Hey Ganesh.” He greeted the two small Officium Mundi life forms that were currently occupying the room. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  Rufus waved a pen leg at him, while he and Ganesh kept looking up models of drones. They’d picked out three to add to the digital store’s cart so far, and since Rufus had been given a debit card for business reasons due to his involvement with the school, he didn’t even have to bother Cathy or Joe or Smoke to make the purchase. Soon, a problem neither of them had really noticed creeping in would be solved, and Ganesh wouldn’t be quite so alone.

  James wasn’t really interrupting, so Rufus didn’t mind. Sometimes this office needed to be teleported into. He completely understood. He also understood how tired the human looked. Rufus and Ganesh shared a look, the drone’s faceted camera eyes glinting before he flapped his rotor wings to gain a burst of altitude and land on James’ shoulder. Even now, years old and with the clarity of context, Ganesh was still more fond of the first human he’d bonded with. But Anesh’s boyfriend was a decent person too, and he deserved a little pat on the head from the drone’s plastic batlike wing.

  ”Heh.” James seemed to sink into the chair as he sighed. “Thanks Ganesh.” The drone tapped him again before buzzing away, landing on the desk again somehow without sending any of the paper notes on it flying. “Today has been long. I’m glad it’s over.”

  Rufus looked up, his single central eye tracking his human companion. A series of taps from his legs on the wood of the desk rotated him loudly to look up at the wall clock, before the same motion in reverse brought him back to looking at James.

  ”Yeah man, I know it’s only noon. It’s still been a long day.” James stared up at the ceiling panels. “At least there’s nothing else I really need to do tod-“

  Rufus tried. He really did. He was frantically waving and trying to warn James of exactly what that kind of talk caused. He’d seen it happen, and not just to humans either. Smoke had once said that she was glad for her new body that did exactly what she wanted, right before she’d fallen down two flights of stairs. When setting up the school building, every time Bill said ‘at least the work is done now’, more work manifested. Taunting fate seemed like a superstition, but it just kept happening.

  Rufus was convinced that there was a deeper magic at play than anything the dungeons caused. Maybe a pillar did it. Maybe Earth itself was a dungeon and all its magic worked on the principle of making life harder for its residents.

  It could have been anything, really, that made James’ phone ring. It could even just be random chance and confirmation bias. Rufus was aware of all possibilities.

  But as he saw James answer, listen to the voice on the other end, and then jolt to his feet to teleport away with barely a goodbye, all Rufus could think was that he really had tried to stop this.

  He just wasn’t powerful enough yet.

  There is a discord! Come hang out with us.

  There is a wiki! It's starting to be come helpful.