“The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.” -Harry Dresden, Blood Rites-

_____

James was eating lunch with Prince, the mimic golden retriever having scared off his counterpart dog by being too social, when Anesh rushed up to him.

“James!  James James, James.”  Out of breath, Anesh settled a hand on James’ shoulder, leaning into him with enough weight that James felt it, but not so much it could topple him from the beanbag chair someone had made the brilliant choice to bring back to their camp.

They were still by the big door, two days later.  James was taking the day off; his whole team was, actually.  Each team was required to take at least one full day of resting, just to be completely safe, and today was his turn.

It wasn’t bad.  He thought he might have gotten bored, but a break from running around fighting books wasn’t a break from being excited by the dungeon.  He’d spent a while familiarizing himself with the translated crossword clues next to the Big Spooky Door, and then another chunk of his day talking with TQ about video games.  It was pretty pleasant, even if he was starting to feel like he should be doing something productive.

Anesh was still staring at him, so James decided to stop waiting for his boyfriend to just tell him what was up.  Zhu beat him to the punch though, the navigator turning a heavy eye on Anesh with an orange flutter.  “Is the big spooky door open?”  He asked.  “I should feel guilty about being excited over a big spooky door, but I’m not.  Did you open it?”

“Don’t be an idiot, big spooky doors are cool and you know it.”  James chastised the navigator.

“Yeah, James, you dumbass.  I do .  That’s the problem .”  Zhu shot back.

Anesh shook James firmly enough that it threatened his lunch.  “Both of you knobs shut up.  Look at this.”  He held up one of the yellow orbs they’d been collecting.

The things were just so wondrous to James.  Yeah, he’d seen thousands of yellow orbs by this point in his life, which… actually was kind of worrying.  He’d promised Anesh, years ago, that they weren’t going to be the kind of murder hobos that killed everything in their path for the loot.  But somewhere along the way, he’d still ended up getting in a lot of fights across the two dungeons that dropped the things.  And yet, still, it was a little bead of magic.  A tiny drop of solid luminescent gold that sat in Anesh’s palm and reminded James that no matter how dumb some of the skills they handed out were, all of this had started with him learning about phone books.

Then the little drop of glowing yellow slipped into Anesh’s hand.

“Wait, what?”  Prince spoke up, the dog’s eyes snapping onto the display.  “What was that?”

“Uh… that’s familiar.”  James added.

Anesh nodded excitedly, his short dark hair catching the light of one of their camp lanterns as he did so.  “It is  isn’t it?”  He held out his hand overhead, staring at the back of it with a grin.  “You know, the Officium Mundi yellows always pick one of the same two adjectives for the kind of energy they give you?  Comfortable or efficient.  This one went with learning , which is kind of the wrong linguistic format.”

“Orb language is sometimes weird.  I think it’s because it’s filtering information through English, not that it’s using English as its native language.”  James answered almost instantly, before holding up a hand to his forehead.  “Wait, hang on.  This also gives you uptime, like, the same as the others?  That’s so fucking weird.   Wait .”

“Wait what?”   Prince demands, the dog standing across from James and Anesh, tail almost pointing straight out behind him, back arched.

James had to hold in a laugh.  He held off on asking Prince why someone who was a mimic pretending to be a dog had so many dog-specific mannerisms.  But then, maybe that was the point, and it showed that Prince was a pretty good mimic.   “Okay, how much of the operations manual did you read?”  James asked.

“I’m a dog .”  Prince replied.

“Fuck off.”  Zhu sighed in exasperation.

James felt like that was a little rude, but he’d been thinking it too.  Then he decided to double down on his friend’s comment.  “You fucking are not.  Stop that.  You’re worse than goddam Ben, and that’s saying something.”  James flicked his eyes up to look at the ceiling of the cave, taking a second to compose himself.  “Okay.  Officium Mundi has almost identical orb colors to the things we’ve found here, and they even play similarly in terms of powers.   But , every one of the orbs there comes from a different source-“

“Like the ones here.”  Zhu spoke up.

“-and also has at least two different uses.  Sometimes as many as four.”  James finished.  “Now.  The orbs here are different, since greens at least don’t modify places, but give a different kind of ‘skill rank’.  The others might be the same, and we really should test a blue and purple since we have them…”

Anesh leaned on James as his partner said that.  “We’ve got some set aside for you.  I know we want to save as many as possible for the copier, and we don’t have many blues, but…”

“But there’s value to knowing up front, yeah.  And it’s past the point where knowing is more important than perfect efficiency.”  James nodded.  “Bring me two in a second.  Anyway.  Yellows have two other known uses.  Absorbing them to ‘sustain’ yourself for an amount of time - and yeah, if you’re curious, they can keep you alive through injuries that should kill you, if you take them after getting hurt - and the other thing they can do is make life .”

If Prince was shaken by James casually telling him they had a way to keep people alive past the point organic bodies failed at, he was utterly demolished by the revelation that the Order casually knew how to make new life out of… “Make life out of what ?”  The dog demanded.  “Why did you wait until now to tell me this?!”

“You’ve literally been hanging out with PenDave this whole time.”  James pointed at the dragon that was casually chewing on a half-eaten dictionary of fake words.

“What.”

“Yeah.  Also read the fucking manual, I put a lot of work into that.  So anyway, now I kinda want to know…” James pulled a handful of yellow orbs out of the pocket of the sweatpants he had on and looked at them curiously.

Anesh pulled back, giving his boyfriend a tilted look.  “Why do you just have a handful of orbs, and also, please don’t make another companion.  Our apartment is already so full.”

“Honestly, we should just move to the Lair.”  James sighed.  “Okay.  So, I need to…” without thinking about it, he went to shove the pile of orbs into his pocket, and smashed about half of them into glittering dust that quickly faded from reality.

[+1 Species Rank : Sturgeon - Chinese Paddlefish]

[+1 Species Rank : Bat - Fruit - Mariana]

[+1 Species Rank : Sauropoda - Diplodocidae - Apatosaurus]

[+1 Species Rank : Moth - Eastern American - Luna]

[+1 Species Rank : Frog]

“You okay?”  Anesh asked as James rubbed at his forehead in frustration.

“Yeah, I’m just kind of a fucking idiot today and I forgot how fragile these things can be.”  James grumbled.  As he moved to more gently put them into his pocket, one of the smaller beads slipped from his grip, and Zhu moved to snag it out of the air.  Which just led to another puff of golden glitter dust, and James’ annoyance turning to amusement as he met Zhu’s eye.  “Get anything good?”

“I will soon become the master of the giraffe.”  Zhu announced.  “Actually, do you think we could ride a giraffe?  I hadn’t thought of it before.  Wait, horses .”  The orange feathers across James’ side spread outward like Zhu was having the revelation of a lifetime.

“You know what?  You take these.”  James handed Anesh the rest of the orbs.  Gently.  “I’m gonna ask that if we do see if these can bring things to life, we wait until we’re out of here to try it.   Tell Dave that I said that. ”  He added sternly as Anesh headed off to exchange the orbs for new ones at their loot carts.  “We can’t keep collecting dragons.”

Zhu traced a talon along the back of James’ hand.  “Why not?”  He asked with a hum like tires on smooth asphalt.  “You collect survivors and engineers and whatever Response is.  Oh, and camracondas.  Actually you collect people who want to sleep with you.”

“That’s…”

“Pretty impressive.”  Prince jumped in.  “I would have thought you’d be too caught up in all this to have any kind of game.”

James stared at the golden retriever, and suddenly had a feeling like he was wasting his banter on Prince.  Like the mimic was just a bit a jerk, but not in a way that clicked with James, that was fun .  “Why are you here?”  He asked the mimic suddenly.  “Also, weren’t you the nice  one?  I thought Ruby was the asshole.  Wait, I’ve lost track, which FBI agent were you  pretending to be?”

Prince huffed, and settled his long snout on folded paws, laying back down like he wasn’t concerned about the questioning.  “Who knows.”  He muttered.  “The names are kinda new, for the kids, you know?”  The mimic let out another huff of air.  “So I could be anyone.”

“I kinda feel like you probably know which one you are.”  James said with a disbelieving frown.

“I kinda do.  But eh, it’s… easier to be interchangeable sometimes.  I don’t know if humans know what that feels like.  There’s something relaxing about being replaceable.  So right now, I’m not the favorite, so that if I die in this stupid place that isn’t making me stronger by the way , then the kids aren’t sad.”

Zhu’s hand tensed against the back of James’ arm, a subconscious move that actually made him wonder just how much of an infomorph’s manifested actions were deliberate since they were creatures of thought.  But he just spread his own fingers so he could interlace them with Zhu’s in a comforting grasp while he answered Prince.  “Honestly, I kinda get it.  Maybe not the way you mean, but you seem really put together for someone who talks about humans like we’re totally foreign.  But yeah, there’s less pressure when you’re not singularly important.”

“Something like that.”  Prince - well, maybe Prince - replied.

“Probably not great that you’re thinking of yourself as ‘not the favorite’ though.”

Prince gave a very uncanine grin to James.  “See, that’s the thing.  I could be either.”

“…this is why you’re not my favorite.”  James said bluntly.   “So, we’re not moving fast enough in here for you?”  He asked, deciding to steer away from the personal and toward the professional.  While James had plenty of questions about the mimics and their human partners, and he actually was curious about whether Ruby and Prince were swapping places, right now he just didn’t feel like this conversation was going to get him an honest personal story about how Prince had met his human friends.

The mimic dog obliged his attempt to steer the conversation.  “Don’t get me wrong.  I know that everything is useful for something.  But I’m having a hard time figuring out how a single point in six different obscure fish and an equal number of more obscure bugs is supposed to make me stronger .”

“You’ve been using more orbs than me.”  James commented idly, not meaning anything by it.

“Uh… I…”

“Chill.  Everyone’s allowed to use some, it’s fine.”  James reassured him.  “The reason we’re saving as many as we are is so that we can make a single copy of all of them with a different magic, and then see if any are powerful enough to keep copying.”  He shrugged.  “We should have tested the purples and blues when we got them, honestly.  But we got distracted by the door, and the slimes.  And then they were packed away, so… you know how it goes.”

“I really don’t.”  Prince scoffed.

Zhu rustled his orange light feathers.  “You’ll learn.”  The navigator said.  “Or leave.  That’s how it seems to go.”

“Grim but fair.”  James nodded.  “Anyway!  We’re not looking for personal strength, though you’ll get some of that, especially as part of you and Ruby’s payout for helping for the other delves.  But we’re starting with the Library because it’s a learning amplifier, which is good, and also because we’re looking for community strength.”  James waved a hand around at the rest of the camp.  “We’re looking to improve at this , at this kind of teamwork, but also we’re looking for magic that scales up.  Stuff we can take back to the Order and say ‘here, go nuts’ and then have Karen do something that turns a weird book into a million dollars.”

“You’re just trying to get rich?”  Prince sounded incredulous.  “ You ?  Really?”

“No, I was using dollars as a value measure.”  James said, before letting out an oof  as Anesh clapped a hand on his shoulder and startled him.  Zhu didn’t react, but Zhu was almost literally an eye in James’ back.  “Hey cutie.”  He said.

Anesh blushed, though his darker skin made it hard to tell in the shadows of their camp.  “Never going to get used to that, am I?”  He laughed.  “Here.  Two orbs.  Though I feel obliged to tell you that both Juan and Amelia have tried the purple orbs, so we do know what they do, but I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be left out or not.  They say it was an accident, but I’m unconvinced for at least her.  Also Keeka says hi.”

“He does not, he wouldn’t have time.”  James laughed softly, glancing behind him as if he’d be able to see Keeka and Arrush cuddled up together where they were lurking on the other side of Pendragon’s bulk.

James had told Vadik when they came in here that Pendragon was smaller than she normally was, and that was technically true .  But she was still - and he didn’t know why his brain couldn’t think of anything large that wasn’t a vehicle - minivan sized.  She could still seat four people, and had a wingspan that could shield half their camp if she stretched out.  The dragon made for a good centerpiece, the way the electric camp lamps made her laminated hide shine was comforting.

“You didn’t really answer my question.”  Prince grumbled.

Anesh glanced at the dog before looking down at James again.   “Is he complaining about how there’s no health potions?”

“Yes.”  James and Zhu said together.  Then James continued over Prince’s barked protest, “Well, no.  But close enough.  It’s that we aren’t leveling up.”

“Oh.  That.”  Anesh met the mimic’s eyes.  “It’s not complicated.  A lot of dungeons give us small magics, but sometimes, they don’t.  We’re here looking for the one ‘don’t’.  Maybe something that reshapes a building in a second, or makes a knight invincible, or annihilates the concept of the number four .  Something like that.  Now, James, eat your orbs and see if those happen, even though I know one won’t.”

James paused.  “Hold up.”  He said, the pair of colored beads sitting in his open hand.  “What was that last one? Did that happen?  Did-“ he was cut off as Zhu closed his own hand around James’, softly forcing his fingers into a fist, and popping both orbs without fanfare.

[+1 Flora Rank : Swedish Ivy]

[+1 Tool Rank : Excavator - Auger - Model 70 PHD 3 Point Digger]

“Wait, Zhu, no!”  James experienced a flash of actual annoyance.  “Which is which?  I actually needed to do those one at a time!”  The navigator squawked an apology, feathers flattening out as he drooped against James.

Anesh tapped his knuckles lightly on James’ skull.  “Hey.  Calm down.  The purple one gives tool ranks.   Irritatingly specific ones , from what I’ve been told.  So, the other one…?”

“Flora rank.”  James said, calming down.  “No problem solving like the OM blues.  Huh.  I’m not gonna lie, I was expecting more of a parallel.”  He grimaced.  “Sorry Zhu.”

“I am sorry too.  I will think next time before committing antics.”

“Hell, I should probably do that too.”  James sighed.  “So I guess we know where you got it from.  Still, that’s kinda huge.  If tool ranks do the same thing, that’s… I wonder how broad of an effect that is?”  His mind started racing with all the things that a multiplicative bonus could add to if you were just magically improved at ‘using a shovel’.  Then another thought impacted James’ brain.  “Oh hey!  Momo’s gonna be annoyed to learn that I was right!  It is flora ranks!  Animal, vegetable, mineral!  I’m so fucking smart.”

“And do either of these give you the strength to fight shadowy child kidnapping organizations?”  Prince asked in a now overtly hostile tone.

James shook his head as he stood up and stretched.  There were so many things he could snap back with in response.  “Who knows?”  He settled on.  “You’re a dog, so maybe magic works differently for you.  Anyway, your teammates look like they’re waiting for you, so get moving.”

He shrugged off whatever Prince said in response, and took smug satisfaction in Zhu’s shaking giggle on his skin as they left to go see about breaking into the big spooky door.

_____

Order Of Endless Rooms Operations Manual (Ceaseless Stacks, Section TBD)

Letter Station

Similar to Officium Mundi’s wi-figments, letter stations are signal interference inside of the Ceaseless Stacks.  It is unclear if they are focused on a point in space, but they are known to migrate across radio bands, and drown out all other signals on the frequency they are using in any given moment.

Letter stations talk continually, and each one has its own voice.  Voices appear to sound human, but this might just be anthropocentrism at work.  The stations speak constantly, don’t pause for breath, and only ever recite letters from the NATO phonetic alphabet.  The letters do not form words in a coherent way, and may be code.

As far as can be determined, there isn’t a good way to kill or drive off a letter station.  But they also aren’t harmful, except that they are attracted to use of radio frequencies, and will constantly migrate to whichever channels delver groups are using for communications.  Developing procedure is to swap frequencies at regular intervals, and always have a backup planned so as to not be caught off guard.

_____

“More stairs.”  Vad said, leaning around a shelf.  “That’s the fourth staircase that isn’t part of a more open landing that we’ve seen today.”

“Mm.  Unpleasant.”  Spire replied, the camraconda leaning around the same shelf but lower down, her impressive upper body strength letting her stretch past Vad with her sinuous neck.  “It is telling us something.”

Vad shook his head slightly, despite not being observed.  “It’s telling us to go downstairs, and I don’t want to.  I thought we were at the bottom!  We went down eight times to get to the camp with the door, and it’s got bedrock!”

Spire-Cast-Behind didn’t bother replying that dungeons didn’t have bedrock.  For all she knew, they did, though it seemed unlikely.  If anything, the solid limits of a dungeon wouldn’t be on the outside of it, regardless.  For some reason she believed that intently, even if thinking about it didn’t do anything to explain how it would work.  Instead, she just analyzed their current position.

The scouting expedition had been fruitful so far.  Even this deep in the dungeon, where things got truly dangerous, they were doing well.  The trap that had exploded and fired library cards like bits of shrapnel had caused injuries, but nothing lethal through the armor.  The trap that had turned a shadow into a puddle that threatened to sink them had been messy, but survivable.  The trap that had electrified the shelves around them in a thin corridor of shelves had been most difficult, but avoiding the arcs of lightning once Juan got the pattern down for them had mostly been an act of timing and dexterity.

Prince had complained through all of it, which Spire-Cast-Behind did her best to be understanding of.  He didn’t see, yet, what an unapproachable treasure he was being given with every orb they collected.  Every piece of ink that swirled onto their bodies.  Every small mystery they uncovered.

They’d found a catalog, and followed the small folded feline’s directions only a short distance away to a secret room.  Then they’d carefully mapped out how to get from the mossy stone ring and the activating pedestal back to the camp, so that the expedition could finally start using some of those words to make some of the strange magic items the Stacks produced.  On the way, they’d found another wonder as they cut across a blank part of the map; a stone globe over a still fountain, with a dark shape prowling across it.  Two things, then, to come back for.

And now, they were cut off.  A trio of those massive paper lions had intercepted their clean line to the camp, and backtracking wasn’t possible either with where they were positioned.  A simple mistake on Spire’s part, and they were poised to die with one more misstep.  It was humbling, in a way.

“Keep moving.”  Spire suggested.  “Between these shelves, down to the steps.  Then… right.  We can make turns and retrace past where the crow was.”

“What if I bleed out before that happens?”  Prince asked, voice too loud for an expedition like this.

“You aren’t bleeding.”  Spire-Cast-Behind said.  “You do not appear to bleed from injuries.  I am bleeding more than you.  Please do not complain as a joke, it makes decisions challenging.”

Juan shuffled closer to the group, walking backward and watching down the narrow and dark shelves behind them.  The humans thought there was something intrinsically ominous about the dark, and Spire was starting to see their point, as every time the group had been required to move through spaces with no lighting, something had tried to kill her.  “They aren’t following.”  He told them.  “But I still don’t think we can go back that way.  What’s the plan?”

Vad looked down at Spire, then sighed as the camraconda deferred to her team leader.  “Head toward the stairs, take a right.  We’ll try to circle back to the intersection with the crow nest, and split from there.  Should be able to make it back to camp without fighting anything huge.”  He paused, and then added his own instruction.  “Also, TQ, radio Alanna’s team.  If they’re nearby, we could use the backup right now, just to be safe.”

Spire-Cast-Behind let out an unintentional hiss of satisfaction, and stiffened slightly as the other camraconda on the team caught it and gave her a small noise of acknowledgement.  She hadn’t actually meant to do that, and she really was trying to let Vadik take the lead.  It was good for him to have some experience with it.  Not that she’d know what that was like.

The team moved cautiously, aware that there were more traps in the area than anyone had expected.  And indeed, Spire-Cast-Behind caught sight of a seemingly innocuous stack of plastic library cards sitting out on a return cart that blocked half the hallway they were using.  She signaled the others, and she and TQ got better lines of sight on the trap while Juan grabbed an inert book from nearby and whipped it at the offending target.  He missed twice before he caught it with a paperback, and a silent detonation threatened to spray the cards across the hall.

Spire felt her sight ‘catch’ a few of them, but the others scattered back into the return cart, overly sharp edges sticking into the wood of the rolling cart or into the nearby sign lying about what the nearest aisle held.  Once she verified everyone was out of the way, Spire let hers go, and TQ did the same, letting a few stragglers slice into books and wood.

“All clear?”  Vad asked, and got a nod.  Though he still took the time to look closely himself, which was a good trait.  “All clear.  Okay.  Let’s move.”

They got as far as the stairs before something tried to kill them again.  This time, it was a standing lamp that opened up glowing wings and spat some kind of luminescent fluid at Prince.  The mimic had reacted by shrieking, and then barked like a gunshot.  This had - strangely in Spire’s opinion - killed the lampad that had ambushed them.  A rough hole punched through its chest dropping it from where it had been starting to flap into the air.  It had also been excessively loud.

“What the shit was that?!”  Vad demanded of the person pretending to be a golden retriever.  “Did you fucking bring a gun… wait, where would you… wait .”

“It’s not technically a gun, relax!”  Prince said, not meeting anyone’s eyes.  “Also stop yelling!  Loud noises are bad here, right?”

“I am very much going to yell at you when we are back to safety.”  TQ had declared.

Spire-Cast-Behind wasn’t as comfortable with that kind of overt emotion as her counterpart on this delve was, but she was starting to come around.  “Banter later.”  She said mechanically.  “Move now.  Incoming.”

“Oh, fuck yeah, incoming.”  Juan’s voice rose in pitch as their rearguard saw dozens of books filled with teeth crawling across the shelves toward them, the noise attracting attention from much farther than they’d cleared out.  One of them, stealthy by its species standards, leapt out at his head from a high perch nearby, and kept snapping even as the ring of floating pencils that Momo had forced the young man to bring intercepted it and held it pinned in place.  Juan made a quick hand gesture that Spire couldn’t follow, and the book was ripped into uneven pieces.  “Run?  Vad?”

“Don’t run, move quickly.”  Vad ordered, his voice falling into a cool confidence in the face of the incoming disaster.  “TQ, Prince, lead.  Call out traps, disarm what you can fast, don’t take chances.  The rest of us, fighting retreat.  Prince, tell us if we’re going to overlap you.”  He grabbed a loose hardback and flung it at a forward target in the approaching horde.  “Go!”

They went.  And it quickly devolved into a melee of snapping fangs and paper that writhed like living skin as texts came over the walls around them and threw themselves at the group with no sense of self preservation.  But it would take more than just the start of an assault like this to hurt them.  The group shifted shield bracers to bites, sending tomes skittering off domes of light, and struck back with deliberately targeted attacks from hand axes and, for the humans, stomps against targets frozen in place on the ground.  Spire-Cast-Behind used the newly upgraded force on her mechanical arms to fire and reload a pair of hand crossbows at anything that came at them from a high arc; only hitting sometimes and never killing, but keeping up a steady stream of suppressive fire that actually did make the texts think twice.  Juan and TQ burned their stored velocity liberally to Pave anything else that got too close, slapping attacks away and sending books sprawling in sprays of inky blood.

They were halfway through their looping path that would put them back on track to the camp, when it became clear that the assault wasn’t letting up.  They weren’t killing the books fast enough; in fact, Spire-Cast-Behind was nearly certain they weren’t killing many of them at all .

Spire-Cast-Behind got a lucky shot off on a book that was dropping toward her; through the lashing tongue and into the ‘throat’ and the thing just dropped limply onto her back.  Fangs scraped against her armor shell, the dead creature no longer ‘biting’ untouched by the shield bracer.  She triggered the automated routine in her arms to reload that crossbow, and froze up as she realized she was out of bolts.  

Then another book slammed into her, because her bracer was dry of charges.  TQ froze it before it could wrap around her, and Vad grabbed it without hesitation before flinging it down the hall behind them.  Another twenty crawled along the floor where it landed, waiting to take its place.

“Well.  This is bad.”  Spire-Cast-Behind stated.

The others didn’t reply as the fight swirled around them, and they pressed back together in a group.  Escape was cut off now, and they were in a lot of trouble.  “Telepad!”  Vad made the call before anyone got seriously hurt.

Juan pulled his out, and TQ started radioing in their escape plan, when Alanna decided to show up.

Spire-Cast-Behind was, tangentially, aware that Alanna was dangerous.  She hadn’t really caught on to just how dangerous.  Or how, perhaps, the raw combat potential of each exploration team wasn’t actually balanced against each other.  Heralded by a thin line of orange light, the woman tore a hole in the maelstrom of living texts.  Flanked by a far more focused and lethal dog, and a man that was definitely abusing the kick strike on the Status Quo greave to maneuver, there was very rapidly not only an escape route, but a turning of the tide.

Vad and Alanna exchanged some rapid words as their teams formed defensive lines. They didn’t even need to pull their firearms at that point; with reinforcements like this, it wasn’t long before what was left of their attackers were routed, with half the books simply choosing to pretend they had been inert fiction novels this whole time.

“Sorry we’re late.”  Alanna apologized, panting, as she fiddled with the thin green bracelet of her authority.  The left half of her face was marked with angry red marks in the shape of oddly set letters.  “We ran into an interdictionary.”

“I told you that you can’t fuckin’ call it that.”  Kirk sighed as Harriet settled into a skirt of peacock feathers around his waist.  “That sounds too much like a real thing.”

“It’s a dictionary that stops us.”  Smoke-And-Ember challenged the man.  “What are we supposed to call it?  A… letter… stopper?  No.  That escaped from me.  Forget those words.”  He said it like it was a command, the camraconda’s flustered mood slipping his grip on the language he wasn’t yet perfectly familiar with.

As they collected the fallen orbs, and made sure no one was hurt in a way that couldn’t wait for the half mile trek back to camp, Spire-Cast-Behind caught her breath, and steadied herself for the rest of their return trip, facing the hardest challenge she tended to have with the other delvers.  Socializing when not under threat of death.

It was, mercifully, not a long walk.  But nothing else tried to kill them, so she had to make an effort to participate in conversation.

_____

“This is the kind of thing that I feel like Momo would have loved to have been here for.”  Thermoclese said as she stared at the stone torus that hovered with its lower edge a centimeter over the wooden floor inside the secret pocket of bookshelves.  “I’ve only sorta talked to her, but this seems like her shit.”

The worn grey rock was shot through with lines of moss, like veins of green quartz only clearly still alive and creeping slightly from their assigned places.  It was impressive, and spooky, and didn’t seem to fit a library at all, much less a Library .  But it was here.  And so they were using it.

There was a podium that came up in front of the stone circle, like an altar to a forgotten god.  And on it, a book.  The book didn’t have a title, or any words in it, except for a single sentence near the middle.  And it wasn’t even a whole sentence; it was an arcane mad lib.

Something winner seizes something.

“So, how does this looming ominous thing work?”  Myles asked her.

He’d been one of the people to volunteer to escort a few of the less violent expedition members out to the secret room, and despite being on a rest day, he’d been allowed because he had a lot of the word tattoos.  Picked up from days of delving and being one of the people who just knew a lot of linguistic trivia.  Thermoclese wasn’t sure if she was comfortable with him, on the grounds that he seemed… normal.  Too normal, compared to most of the Order, even if he did say shit like “looming ominous thing”.

Anesh, though, she was fine with.  He was too gay to be perfectly normal, even if he faked it a lot.  “So, the book over there has a fill-in-the-blanks in it.”  He told Myles.  “You put collected words in, and the ring makes a magic item from that.”

“What kind of item?”  Myles asked, narrowing his eyes at the engine of creation.

“Uh… magic.”  Thermoclese said.  “I’m not sure how we’re supposed to know that.  We’ve found ones of these things.”

Anesh gave Myles a thin smile as he stacked up a few wide books to make a low table for himself, and cracked a laptop open.  “She’s being rude, but she’s right.  We only ever had that lion figurine that we made.  And Therm’s also right, because Momo did love this thing.  And those figurines.”

“Don’t call me that.”  Came the almost unthinking reply.

“Apologies.”  Anesh said easily.

Myles didn’t drop it, instead running his hand through the air near the ring, but carefully not touching it.  He jolted in shock as a nesting crow cawed  into his head, dragged out of his thoughts and back to the world of wood and fake books he was in.  “Right, uh, what did the lions do?  Did they turn into lions?”

“No, that would be too cool.”  Thermoclese said as she paged through the massive tome, just in case there was something else.  “They were one-use things that made things weird.”

Anesh stood up from his crouch as he finished getting his spreadsheet set up for their record keeping.  “That’s reductive.  I think they made people distrust authority in an area around them while the effect lasted.”  He nodded politely to the people who walked in the entrance of the secret room, Arrush and TQ making sure the way was safe for Chevoy and Amelia.  “Alright, this is everyone for now, right?”

“The rest of them won’t shut up about the door.”  Chevoy complained.  “It’s not complicated , it’s just a really simple crossword.”

“A crossword complicated by the fact that different languages have different spellings for words, yes.”  TQ ‘agreed’ with a nod.  “I enjoy the puzzle of it.  But Chevoy is correct, it was simple to create an index of translations of words and compare overlapping characters to find potential correct solutions.  Finding the words will be the hard part.”

Anesh and Thermoclese shared a glance, ignoring Amelia as she went over to run a hand on the stone ring while she stared in wonder at the floating artifact.  Anesh turned back to the camraconda.  “You’re smarter than people think, aren’t you?”  He asked.

“James says that to me sometimes.”  TQ said, somehow making his digital voice come across as smug.

Amelia had wandered over to the book, and was staring at it like she was peeling back the secrets of the universe.  “What were the words?”  The older woman spoke like an interrogator who had no expectation of not getting an answer.  “The words used for the lion statuettes.”

“Tyrant breaking tongue.”  Anesh answered instantly.  It was hard to forget that one.

Arrush made a noise that it took a second for most of the group to interpret as a low laugh.  “Impressive tongue.”  He rasped out, before laughing to himself again.  Anesh found himself grinning ear to ear at the ratroach without thinking about it; just happy to see him making a joke without worry.

“In case you’re wondering,” Thermoclese added as she tried to impolitely elbow her way back to the commanding spot at the pedestal, “we know  that it looks like we made an item that does what the words that went into it say.”  Amelia looked at her with her mouth set in a thin line, and eyes that were already looking back as she tried to calculate the thousand and one ways this could be applied.  “Don’t get too excited.  Part of what we’re here to test is if that’s actually true.”

Amelia just nodded silently, staring at the creation torus with a look halfway between awe, and the desire to peel it apart to learn what made it work.

“So!”  Thermoclese declared a little too loudly, disturbing the pen and ink crow overhead.  “Are we done?  Can we start now?”

“I do have more questions.”  Amelia said softly, pulling her eyes down to fix on where Anesh and Chevoy were looking at a list of nouns they had available.  “Why do we not find another book?”

Anesh made one final note then glanced over.  “You mean, a different book like that one?”  He pointed at the heavy tome on the dias and got a sharp eyed nod in reply.  “I’m not even sure we can.  We can’t move that one at all, except to flip the pages.  Maybe if we brought another one in, it’d be different, but we can’t exactly find them on command.”

“Yes we can?”  Arrush pushed his discomfort with talking too much away to ask.  “The… navigators.  Or the armored girl.  Or a catalog.”  He used one of his spare hands to tick off options.

“All good choices, actually.”  Anesh agreed.  “Though we don’t want to use the navigators too much that way, because they can cause mishaps .”

“Zhu apologizes for that again, by the way.”  TQ interjected.

Anesh nodded stoically.  “Anyway.  Cam’s fortune sense has something like a month long cooldown, so she’s recovering that.  And catalogs or maps, if we find them, we should totally use, after we get the rest of the words to open the big door.  That’s a good point, and I have no excuses.  We’ll see if we can find another book.”

Arms folded and foot tapping, Thermoclese made her impatience known.  “Is everyone happy now?  Can we make some magic items?”

“Satisfied.”  Arrush said as he wiped the back of a glove on the corner of his muzzle.

“Yes, for now.  I would like to see this working too, I think.”  Amelia added.

They got down to the real reason for securing this site.  In ones and twos, matching words across multiple languages into a linguistic format that might or might not line up to any of them, they spoke the words they had collected from around the Ceaseless Stacks.  Small lines of living ink sliding painlessly off of skin or chitin or cable to fill the waiting slots in the tome.

And each time, the torus would light up.  The moss glowing an otherworldly green, a thin slice of space in the open air of its center glowing brightly.  Then the light would vanish, quicker than it arrived, and there would be something hanging in the air in the center of the cracked stone ring.

They started with the ones that sounded like they could be directly useful to the Order, and worked down the list for the sake of being thorough and also making it so no one had to walk around with tattoos they didn’t want.

Beloved Winner Seizes Momentum created a sculpture of a blooming flower that fit in the palm of a hand.  Thermoclese and Chevoy disagreed on exactly how it would be useful, but agreed it would probably work best for training, and since the magic was untested, all three copies got to sit for now along with their argument.

Broken Winner Seizes Recovery made a small wooden carving of a pumpkin.  The hope for the four copies of that they had were that they would heal the injured after a fight.  Assuming, probably, that the Order had won .  They actually had two versions of it, with the chinese word for recovery not fitting the same syntax, and also making the pumpkin purple.

They ran into problems with words that had double meanings, but speaking the word in english seemed to apply the chosen definition.  Which is how they got Skirmish Winner Seizes Blades , and also Bargain Winner Seizes Blades  from the same Hebrew text Amelia had picked up.  They looked identical, but Thermoclese and Arrush both agreed they felt different, so Anesh labeled them carefully with duct tape before they moved on.

It wasn’t long before they ran out of things that sounded, if not useful, then at least to carry a kind of powerful weight to them.  But Anesh was firm that there was no such thing as a useless magic item, and Thermoclese was adamant that while Anesh was wrong , that they could still learn from the useless ones.  So they kept filtering words in until everyone was out of everything but the last one or two adverbs.

Myles found personal humor in Fungal Winner Seizes Cleaning.   He didn’t know why, but the little sandstone mushroom it made felt warmly familiar in an amusing way.  Anesh said the shape was a coincidence; Myles said that he didn’t care.

Finally, they checked off the last viable word pair with Wet Winner Seizes Color , got a granite rendition of a soggy and unhappy Siamese cat, and were done with the process.  From start to finish, expending about a hundred words, marking down combinations, alternate meanings, and labeling and packing up the creations that they were assuming were all single use, it had been about three hours.

Anesh was already tired, but some of the others seemed excited to do more.  “Alright.”  He got their attention, cutting off the muttered monologue that Amelia was working on as she stared at the ring.  “Let’s head back, we can rotate out new escorts and extras so that we can get some more words in here, and so Arrush and TQ can do something more fun than watch us mess around.  Amelia, we’re going to be doing another production run, do you want…?”

“Matter ex nihilo. ”  The woman said, one hand resting in the inside of the floating stone ring.  She was leaning on it, but it was stubbornly refusing to move.  Her head swung around to look at the others.  “Did you know about this?”  She demanded.

“Uh, yeah?”  Chevoy said like it wasn’t a big deal.  She and Thermoclese shrugged at each other.  “Yeah.  We’re not on speaking terms with entropy.”

“Fuck the end of all things!”  Thermoclese added.  “We’re gonna fuck it.  But with replicators.  Which we have two of now I guess, since you’re totally right, and this one is making matter from nothing, even if it is a limited replicator?”

“Three.”  TQ stated cheerfully.  “If you count making bullets.”

“Three replicators, thanks hisses.”  Thermoclese grinned.  “So Amelia’s going to stick around I guess.  Let’s go find some new resources.”

“Say it in a better way.”  Anesh told her as he checked that his armor was on properly, and led the group out of the secret room and back on the path to their camp.

Just because they had cleared the way was no reason to get complacent.  They were in a dungeon .  Acting like it was a casual stroll was how people were going to get hurt.

Though he admitted he was still excited to get back and see what else they could make.

_____

Ceaseless Stacks Expedition Report - Day 4 - Discovery

See paired map segment CS 3-8-15.

Delve team 3 discovered a series of tunnels through what was thought to be a section of impassible dungeon.  Two entrances were found concealed behind secret bookshelves, and the tunnels lead into segments of the dungeon that have gone unmapped due to no clear way to reach them.

Exploration was postponed due to injury on the team.  They report the sound of running water, as well as the sound of birds.  Since we have had luck finding purple orbs in ‘marsh’ areas, this could be worth checking out in the future.

The tunnels require humans to duck, but camracondas can traverse them easily.   Material is coarse stone, though it lacks jagged edges or protrusions visible from the entrance.

_____

James and Arrush sat together on a moss covered shelf perched over a lake.  Their team was taking a short rest, and Frequency and Zhu were on lookout right now.  So James had sat down to watch their newest find, and was pleasantly surprised when Arrush had joined him.

Tomorrow, they were going to head back.  The route to the entrance was mapped out, and they could easily make the trip as a group.  The whole expedition had been carefully planned by James and more carefully orchestrated by Anesh so that no one was exhausted or pushed too far.  They’d had injuries by this point, but Nik and his authority were more than proficient enough to stitch wounds and replenish lost blood, and nothing had been worse than that.  There’d be some new scars, but no one had lost a limb or an internal organ.

It was a shame, because James was starting to really like this place.  But they could always come back.  Maybe this would become his full time job; spending weeks or months at a time leading people through dungeons.

He’d picked up another handful of ranks in things; everyone had.  Arrush had gotten a species rank in grasshoppers, which was actually kind of cool, and James had tried another purple orb to find a tool rank in awls , which was weird.  Nothing life changing, just small improvements that they could all count on for the rest of their lives.

And they’d found some really amazing stuff.  Like the thick off-white lake they were sitting on the shore of.  At the end of a tricky hall of traps and ambushes, carpeted with something that seemed to consume sound around them, they’d found a basin carved into the stone floor of the Ceaseless Stacks.  Collapsed shelves and tables around it like it had just been punched down into the environment.  Small waves lapped at the cracked marble, though where they came from was anyone’s guess; it wasn’t an ocean, they could clearly see the other side a hundred feet away.  It wasn’t even technically a lake; James was pretty sure it qualified as a pond.

It was also full of liquid paper.

That had been a real surprise.  The stuff dried eventually, and could be used to coat a surface in something that was easy to write on.  It could also be melted , and turned back to liquid form, which meant the little pond here was above room temperature, though that was the least surprising part.  It was clearly paper, it just didn’t behave materially like paper was supposed to.  James had no idea what to do with that information, or if this was something that could be useful, but they’d collected a large amount of it just to mess around with.

It was just casual magic that ignored physical laws.  James loved it, even if it did smell kinda odd.

“You know,” He said out loud to Arrush, “I’m gonna miss this place after we leave.”  The ratroach tilted his head slightly, two of the eyes that were offset on the right side of his head locking onto James at a sharp angle.  “Not the fighting and especially not the long term camping part.  Oh, boy, am I looking forward to actually having a real bathroom again.  But this .”  He motioned to the pond.  “It’s cool.  I like this.”

“I also like this.”  Arrush spoke softly.  The Library was a lot of things, but the way it demanded quiet in a number of different ways actually worked in the ratroach’s favor.  When there weren’t any other people around, and they weren’t in combat, he had a much easier time being heard.  He could speak quietly, without hurting his throat, and still be understood.  “I like time with people.”  Arrush added, tilting his angular head to bring more eyes to focus on James.

“Uh huh.”  James smiled.

“I meant…”

James tipped sideways to let the shoulder of his armor bump into Arrush’s.  “I know what you meant, it’s alright.  I’m not gonna be offended or anything, we’ve talked about this.”  He sighed.  “And you know what?  I also like having you around.  So don’t panic.”  James held a hand over his mouth to cover a silent chuckle as he noticed Arrush shifting back and forth to sit straighter and more confidently.  They watched the paper swirl and flow for a few minutes before James spoke again.  “We should do this sometime outside.  Out on Earth, I mean.  Go to an actual lake, maybe camp for a couple days.  I feel like I’ve been inside too much lately, if we include dungeons.  I feel like I’ve been inside too much in my whole life .”

“I would.”  Arrush agreed with the proposal instantly.  “Going outside is… um…” he thought about word choice as they sat and rested.  “Not scary.  Not anymore.  And I like it.  But I only go out with people.”

“That’s right, you go jogging with Alanna now!”  James perked up.  “Also I do totally know what you’re getting at, I think.  I don’t go anywhere unless I’m supposed to be doing something, or if I’m with someone else.  Like, just wandering around and looking at things feels… uh… awkward?  Wrong?”

“Yesss!”  Arrush hissed suddenly, a few corrosive drops spraying from his bared fangs.  “I feel like I don’t belong.  And I don’t!  But that’s okay.  But also I would go camping.”

“You absolutely shouldn’t have to feel like you don’t belong.”  James whispered, staring at the ratroach with a sudden pang of sorrow.

Arrush made a half-shrug motion with some of the extra arms that protruded from his back and flank.  “Don’t be sad.”  He told James with his own morose cracked grin.  “I belong here .  With us.  Everyone else… they don’t not matter.  But if they won’t accept me, I am not going to try or care.”  He titled his head up and looked at the layered iron bands that crossed overhead.  An illusion of a skylight with false light streaming through it to light up the odd liquid they’d found.  Arrush didn’t exactly feel good about it, but he’d been talking to his therapist about the nature of acceptance, and he was starting to not only understand, but to feel  like the most important person who could accept him was himself.  It was nice.  Even if it was a work in progress.

“Alright…” James said, not quite party to the internal thoughts of his friend.  “Well, everyone here accepts you.  Just in case you were curious.  I mean, fuck, even Camille seems fine with it, and I’ll be honest, I expected a fight there.  Like, an argument fight, not a fight fight.”

“Oh.  Good.  I don’t want to hurt her.”  Arrush wasn’t sure if he even could, but the statement was true.  He didn’t want to hurt anyone .  “I don’t like arguing either.”  He dipped his face down to stare at his own claws, folding and unfolding them nervously.

James patted him on the back, which was mostly a symbolic gesture since there was more than a little armor between the points of contact.  But he hoped it reassured Arrush anyway.  “I know, it’s cute.”  He said, causing the ratroach to flush bright green around his eyes.

A small spear of orange light caught James’ attention as it wove through the shelves on the opposite shore.  There was a slight hesitation, before the glowing line decided to just cut across the surface of the lake and wrap around James’ arm.  Zhu pulled his manifest form together quickly, the simple shape turning into complex feathers and a glowing eye in seconds.   “Sorry to interrupt your romantic moment, but there’s something singing coming this way.”  He said.

“More companionable than romantic, I think.”  James said as he stood and offered Arrush a hand up.  “But I dunno, could go either way; Arrush, what was it to you?”

“I won’t tell you.”  Arrush huffed through his snout in embarrassment, looking away from them.  “And I hear it.”

“Same.”  James said.  “Simon, Myles, Sunny!  Storyteller headed this way!”  The others scrambled to get up and double check armor and weapons as James walked away from the pool of paper and back into the middle of their group.  “Options?”

“We’re not hauling this cart in a hurry while being chased.”  Simon said bluntly.  “We’ve got, what?  Thirty gallons of paper in here?”  The man paused, and looked down at his feet with his eyes pressed closed.  “Yeah, I know, that’s a weird thing to say.”  He softly said, mostly to himself.

“We could come back for it.”  Myles said, advocating for retreat.  “It’s not like we need this stuff.”

Frequency-Of-Sunlight gave a sharp hiss underneath her spoken words.  “Or we could just fight it!”  She declared.  “I’ll look at it, you all punch it!  Easy!”

A quick vote followed, and while Myles grumbled over it, he still got ready with the others to ambush the incoming guardian creature.  “Okay, remember.”  James told them.  “The storytellers can talk in your head, like the crows.  So even if Sunny locks it down, it can still react.  Who hears it singing?”  He raised his hand, along with Arrush and Simon.  “Alright.  We’re marked targets, so when it starts narrating, be ready to improvise, okay?”  The others nodded, and moved to get in position.  “If it passes by,” James added, “just let it go, right?”  Simon flashed him a thumbs up.  Sunny nodded.  Arrush didn’t say anything, because Arrush assumed James knew that he would always go along with any plan he had.

The singing didn’t get louder, though when the storyteller stepped out onto the opposite shore of the pond, it did get more present .  James could feel the light melodic humming like it was radiating from his bones.  Something real and seeping into the world in a concrete way as the human shaped figure moved.  They were wearing a tweed robe that hung in strips of cloth off slender limbs, a face like a curious porcelain mask, and a habit of moving from place to place in short bursts before almost freezing to examine what they were looking at or touching with one of the sharpened fingers.

It was halfway around to their side of the pond when it spotted someone.  To be fair, James was going to try talking to it, but now there wasn’t even a chance of a good first impression.  The librarian priestess locked its eyes onto Arrush’s hiding spot a few seconds too early, and with a flutter of her hand, pulled a dozen pages from books and papers scattered around, formed them into wickedly sharp paper airplanes, and fired them forward in a barrage.

Arrush rolled out from behind the shelf, extra arms pulling him along the floor as he scuttled away from the attack.  James and Simon moved too, rushing the storyteller even as it started to narrate.

“ There was a crack of wood and a splash of liquid, and a sudden shifting of the ground, as one of them tumbled sideways-! ”  The voice that wasn’t quite speaking bounced around the battlefield as James saw the thing spring into a crouch behind a reading chair.

He answered the dangling thread, grabbing onto the story and adding his own words before they could be made real.  “The shelf dropped into the lake, while the delver fell back onto the stone!”

There was a trick they’d learned that was exceptionally hard to keep track of in a fight.  The storytellers could rewrite reality, but delvers could counter it, but , you had to follow the purest rule of improv.   Only yes and .  James couldn’t stop someone falling now that it was stated, all he could do was rewrite where they were going.  Fortunately, it seemed like storytellers were balanced in their own way, and couldn’t just outright kill someone.  But still.

Suddenly he was running alone, as Simon was behind him and toppling onto his side.  The other delver rose and circled the pond on the other side, unharmed, but that had been close.

James ducked a paper airplane sent his way, and then took another on his arm guard.  They were sharp, but he was wearing stuff designed to stop knives, so even magical paper wasn’t getting through.  He just needed to be careful about his eyes.  And to close in to melee range where he could engage the storyteller without being under bombardment; they weren’t nearly as physically strong as stuffed shirts.  Either that, or hem it in so Myles and Simon could handle it.  Or get it out from behind the chair.  His teammates would handle that, James just had to do the hard part first.

“ The charge faltered with a simple trip! ”  The voice yelled as a paper airplane tried to hit his forehead.  “ A sudden drop, the upcoming floor, and then-“

“He hit the padding of the chair!”  James gasped out as fast as he could, his mind prodded slightly into place with Zhu’s help.  “Clearing it out of the way!”

He barely got it out before the song thrummed and made it real.  And then his foot snagged on something, and he was plunging forward; the space around him had snapped to somewhere different, not unlike using a telepad, except he was only twenty feet ahead.  Moving at a new angle, James sprawled forward, dropping his hand axe and getting his arms up over his head as he slapped limply against the armchair that the storyteller was hiding behind.  The air rushed out of his lungs as he landed, and then the world tipped over him as more force than he should have had made sure he rolled along with the furniture.

Then the storyteller froze in place as it was exposed to Frequency-Of-Sunlight; the camraconda’s stare from across the pond of liquid paper locking it down.  Shortly after, as James shoved the heavy chair off himself and rose on shaking legs, Simon and Myles rushed it from opposite sides.  The storyteller said something that Simon didn’t react to in time, and he vanished before he could strike, but Myles connected a solid hit to the creature’s side, the thrust of a blade slipping under the tweed robe and plunging into its chest.

No longer being bombarded, Arrush had made good time catching up, and the ratroach moved in to finish off the storyteller.  But then it said one more thing, which James caught as he pushed off a lopsided table on the pond’s shore to put himself back in the fight.

“… asked for mercy, and knew it would be granted, because-“  the unmoving creature with its unchanging mask of a face let the pause hang, as Arrush was about to stab several blades into it.

Then the ratroach, before the magic even took hold, pulled his strikes and straightened to the closest thing to a looming stance he could manage with his warped spine.  “Because that would be the end of it.”  He said.  “And they would never attack these people again.”

Something in the air twisted, and then was true.  As Simon stumbled out of a nearby row of shelves, kicking a persistent and angry hardcover biography off his greave, he found everyone catching their breath and standing around like everything was perfectly normal.

The storyteller looked down at itself, then back at Arrush with its head tilting in what seemed like confusion.  Its head kept tilting slowly, until it had rotated almost a hundred and twenty degrees in a move that would kill basically anyone else who tried it, before it froze and kept looking at him.

James walked up to Arrush and patted him on the shoulder, trying to suck in a breath to replace what had been slammed out of him.  “Nice one.”  He said, before turning to the storyteller while the others approached cautiously.  “Hey there.”  James said to the inhuman dungeon creature.  Up close, it was easier than ever to see that its face was a facsimile; he wasn’t even sure if those were real eyes, or if it had eyes at all.  “We’re just passing through.  Would you like to-“

“ He didn’t finish talking before the prey was gone, running with its tell tale magic to-“

James held up a hand to Simon and Arrush while the other two delvers held back farther, not having heard the storyteller’s monologue.  He just sighed, and shrugged.  “Well, if you ever want to say hi…” He said.

And then the magic twisted, and the thing was gone.  Somewhere else, having escaped, just like it said it would.

“That was so cool!”  Frequency-Of-Sunlight said as she slithered up suddenly to circle around where they storyteller had been.  “You were all teleporting everywhere, and it all lined up perfectly, and then Myles was like ‘haha!  I’m cool and have a sword!’ and that was great!   We should fight more things like this, and less things like the stupid fucking books that can bite through my tail.”

James grinned wildly when he saw Myles trying to contain his emotions at being called cool.  “Yeah, we’ll take that under advisement.”  He told the camraconda.  “Alright.  If we’re feeling okay, let’s head back to camp before that thing comes back with friends.  I wanna get some real sleep before we do the last thing here and then head home.”

The others nodded agreement, and they left the pond of gently lapping paper behind, tugging their cart full of loot behind them.

“Ya know,” Myles offered, “ I wasn’t affected by that.  I could have stabbed it.”

“Sure.”  James shrugged.  “But it asked for mercy.  Isn’t that enough?”

Myles thought about it as they walked, before he nodded to himself.  “Guess it is.”  He said to no one in particular.

_____

There was one last thing they all wanted to do before they left the dungeon.

Everyone took a few hours to rest.  Eat something, take a nap if they needed to, awkwardly use the bathroom before the magical buckets were packed away.  Then they had packed everything up.  Carts were loaded with everything they had found, everything they were taking back with them, and everything left over from their original supplies.  The lost weight of missing water and tools that had been damaged or lost was replaced by sacks of collected orbs, cases of created items, and dozens of recovered computer pieces.

Then they’d set up for action.  The non-combatants, and also Camille to keep them safe just in case, had retreated to the top of the staircase that they’d camped at the bottom of.  Everyone else had set up behind cover, figured out camraconda angles, confirmed secondary positions in the event something disruptive happened, and double checked that all their guns were loaded and ready.

And then TQ and Vad had brought the last two words that the arched stone door needed to complete its puzzle.  The tattoo words slid off of them as they spoke the answers to the crossword clues, filling in the empty spaces that covered the face of the rocky edifice.

There were bets on the line about what was behind the door, but because it was generally accepted that there was a fifty percent chance that it was a dragon of some kind, the entire expedition was in position to fight if needed.   Though Anesh was also standing front and center as TQ and Vad retreated to their assigned spots, to attempt diplomacy if possible.  He had the invaluable laser pointer that could project emotions, and honestly he was feeling pretty calmly excited about the prospect of trading hoards with a bookwyrm of some kind.  Which hopefully meant any hypothetical dragon would be too.

The words settled into their place as everyone held their breath.  And then, after a few long minutes as the puzzle’s lines started to glow with a pale lilac light, the tall arched door split open with a completely silent motion.

Over a dozen delvers, experienced in their own right but freshly improved by a week of adventure and action, clutched their weapons and waited to see what would come out of the dark space on the other side of the threshold.  The doors continued to peel outward without a sound, and no one in the expedition felt like making a noise to break the silence.

Then the doors stopped.  Hanging open on unseen hinges, the puzzle’s light fading out to nothing.

Nothing charged out, no twisting dark cavern revealed itself, no sudden violence erupted.  Instead, there was just a single display podium, barely illuminated by the lanterns placed around the door by the Order.  It was a modern style, like it belonged in a mundane history museum.  Driving that vibe home, to James at least, was the thing sitting on it.  Held up on one of those thin metal frames that he had only ever seen in museums, a slightly damaged stone tablet faced the expedition.

There were a few pieces of writing on it, but most of it was blank.  And it sat there, waiting for them.

“Huh.”  Anesh said.  “Should I…?”  He looked around for confirmation, and got a nod from James.  So, covered by everyone else, he crept forward slowly.  Nothing bad happened when he stepped through the doors, nothing bad happened when he picked up the tablet, and nothing bad happened when he walked back out.  The doors didn’t even mystically close behind him, they just sat open as a reminder of the hard work it had taken to crack them in the first place.  “Wonder what this does?”  He said as everyone started to relax.

The thick stone lit up in his grip, and Anesh would later admit to James that it had taken every ounce of composure he had to not scream and fling it at the floor.  A single small point of light at the top of the tablet, shining brightly.  And, upon closer inspection, creeping slowly to the right.

“Is that… what an ancient loading bar looks like?”  Someone had asked.

No one had any better suggestions.

“Alright!”  James declared voice echoing off the now bare stone; sleeping bags and camp supplies and carts all packed away and no longer making the open dark cavern feel in any way like home.  “That was it!  We did something impressive, and now it’s time to go!  Let’s go tell the others so they can stop worrying we’re getting murdered, and then get outta here.”  He grinned at the group.  “Milkshakes are on me, for anyone who inexplicably feels like spending more time together after a whole week getting on each other’s nerves.”

The expedition opened up into chatter as they split into their small groups and ascended the dungeon staircase to meet up with the rest of their members.  It was a long walk back to the door to reality before their exit window, but even after they’d made it in good time, tired and sore and ready to be out of this place…

Some people still took James up on his offer.

_____

Ceaseless Stacks Expedition Report - Day 7 - Acquisitions

Size 1 yellow orbs (Library) : 1220

Size 2 yellow orbs (Library) : 41

Size 3 yellow orbs (Library) : 2

Size 1 blue orbs (Library) : 181

Size 1 purple orbs (Library) : 297

Size 2 purple orbs (Library) : 3

Size 1 green orbs (Library) : 17

Living word tattoos (total remaining, see spreadsheet) : 25

Created items (X winner seizes X) : 110

Created items (Loving X X) : 22

Computer components (Various) : 80

Mundane books with titles that amused someone : Over 20

Recovered artifact (stone tablet) : 1

Friendly footshells : 3

Friendly ink crows : 1  0 (The crows cannot be trusted)