“As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot.” -Thomas Bangalter, Daft Punk-

_____

“Joining us this week, it’s James !”  Sarah’s normally exuberant voice took on a different timbre when she was speaking into a microphone.  Not like she was pretending to be someone else, but like she was taking all that energy and optimism and personal vibe  and cramming it down into the most compressed point that she could, so that she was able to launch it into a recording losslessly.

James, sitting across from her in the small recording studio in one of the Lair’s basements, found it deeply intimidating.  He’d said so, at least once, and Sarah had given him a bright eyed grin that was so innocent and earnest that he truly wondered at what the depths of her powers really were.  “You have to specify which James.”  He told her with a little sass in his voice.  “Just in the Order, there’s at least three living Jameses, since we brought on our new security teams.  And I know some people share this with their friends outside our organization.  Someone’s gonna mistake me for James O’Keefe.”

“No one is going to mistake you for James O’Keefe.”  Sarah snorted in an undignified way that she knew wouldn’t be picked up.

James put a hand on his chest.  “Am I not charismatic enough to be an actor?”  He said.

Sarah faltered slightly, her voice losing the projection and growing concerned.  “James, who do you… who do you think that is ?”

“…I’m not going to lie, I’ve just got the name in my head, and I assumed he was an actor or something.”  James pulled out his phone and started typing a google search.  “Hang on, I’m gonna check… wait, this fucker?  God dammit.  Can we start over and I can pick someone who isn’t a Nazi?”

“ Please .”

They started over and did the bit again, with James pushing down the part of his brain that told him that repeating himself was awkward.  He went with James Franco for the joke on the second run through, and Sarah’s joie de vivre was rapidly restored.  

“So joining us this week is James Lyle.”  Sarah said with the cadence of someone rolling their eyes as dramatically as possible.  “Here to talk to us about… James my notes for you say ‘math and ethics’.  Did you subvert my production assistant?”

“Yes.”  James lied as easily as he snarked.  “How do you think I got on the roster for this anyway?   Sarah, literally everyone else you interview for this is more interesting than me.”

“That can’t  be true.”  Sarah’s smile was infectious.

He nodded at her, before remembering that they were producing audio and he needed to cut that kind of gesture.  “The most boring person you’ve interviewed was Rufus, and that’s pretty impressive considering I think he’s killed a god.”

“People keep saying that, but I don’t think it’s true.  He seems too unassuming.”

In truth, Sarah’s guests were pretty representative of the Order as a whole.  Wildly diverse, all with their own fun perspectives on the world, and all of them wrapped up in personal projects that were either going to reshape the world, or get them into a lot of trouble.  Sometimes they talked about dungeons or magic or the important things that they wanted everyone to be aware of, other times it was just Sarah chatting with newer life like the ratroaches or stuff animals about their lives, and their own unique challenges and viewpoints.  Sometimes it was both.

“Well, what do you wanna start with, the math or the ethics?”  James asked her.  Sarah made a noise of suggestive neutrality, and left the decision to him, so he sighed and launched into the math, planning to get it out of the way first.  “Okay.  Let’s talk about teleporters.”  He started.

“I love teleporters!  Are we talking about teleporters on a tactical level, or on a more broad social and logistical one?”  The contrast between her almost childlike wonder and the specific question caused a weird reaction in James’ brain where all he wanted to do was open up to her and explain anything she asked.  Sarah would make a good interrogator, he decided.

“Part two.”  He answered.  “So, the teleporter we got from the Wolfpack, and have started making copies of.  There’s something like fifty thousand words of report written on it by this point on our server, but I want to disambiguate some of it, so that everyone can start thinking about it and helping out with adding or fixing plans.”  She gave him a ‘go ahead’ kind of nod, and he continued.  “The teleporters take electricity, and I think they come from an era where getting lightning to strike something would be the only way to charge them.  Either that or it’s bad planning on a dungeon’s part, because we can use them almost indefinitely.  They transpose two twenty eight meter diameter spheres.  And they can be aimed with GPS coordinates.”

“I thought they were a fancy set of gears that you had to manipulate like a stargate.”  Sarah sort of asked.  “Like from that movie, Stargate.”

“Not the show?”

“Or from that show, Stargate.”  Sarah added like James hadn’t said anything.  “I had actually been going to ask about fine tuning them.”  She already had a lot of the information, but the point was for James to explain it.

James laughed at the banter.  “Yeah.  Well, it turns out if you want them to set themselves, you can just put a destination in the center.  Which is what you guys did with Zhu’s heart, to save me from certain death.  And it should work with any navigator heart, though let’s avoid that, because it also just works with GPS readings, and that’s much more ethical.  Also really precise.”  He leaned back.  “So if we can run these things nonstop, and we can, we can really effectively take over global shipping.  Which we should and will do , but not specifically to set ourselves up as King Of Everything.  More because these things are faster, cheaper, and cause basically no pollution.”

“Sorry, all of it?”  Sarah prompted.

“Yeah.  So, math time.”  James preemptively apologized.  “I mostly got Reed and Nik to do the numbers on this, but I helped a bit because computers are basically magic and my literal magic skills for logistics help a lot.  Human civilization moves about forty million shipping containers across the Pacific every year.  One of our teleporters, assuming that we are moderately efficient, can move about half a million a year.  We can replace every cargo ship on the Pacific with eighty of them. Though that’s kind of optimistic, and it might take more.”  He gave an unseen shrug.  “The thing about cargo shipping is, it’s already centralized , and has a lot of professionals who are experts at fast loading and unloading.  So it’s a great target to start with, before we start looking at rail yards and whatever airport hellscape Amazon uses as a distribution site to make free two day shipping happen.”  James took a breath and quashed the urge to fiddle with his microphone cord.  “Right now, we can do sixteen Officium Mundi duplications a week, and we can fit two teleporters in each one.  Which means we can get up to a little over a hundred of these things in a month, and in fact, have already started to do so.”

Sarah interjected with an interview question.  “So, you think this is worth prioritizing over the cure for cancer, or the tools that keep us safe?  Other telepads, or armory kits?”

“To be fair, there’s room to fit a few orbs in the duplication.”  James said.  “But… yeah.  I really do.  We don’t talk about it a lot, as a society, but pollution is a part of what causes cancer in the first place.  Eliminating a huge chunk of it will make our job easier.  Also we’re still churning out the potions for the lung cancer cure, even without the replicator, and that  isn’t slowing down.”  He sighed.  “It feels overwhelming sometimes.”  He said.

“It does.”  Sarah said sympathetically.  “All of this does.”

“Well, fortunately, we have math to save us.”  James said wryly.  “The thing about these… I dunno, objects of logistical power…”

“Logisticors?”  Sarah suggested.

“I’m willing to go with that until Alanna strangles me for saying it, sure!”  James agreed brightly.  “The thing about the logisticors is that once we have them, we have them.  There’s probably going to be a need to replace them sometimes for maintenance or wear and tear, but within a year at our copy rate, we can have enough for all sea shipping in the world.  A year after that, and we can have covered most major rail yards as well.  Globally.  Though we won’t need to, because a lot of them become obsolete when you can go direct-to-destination.  And that’s assuming we stick to sixteen replicator rituals a week, and we’re not gonna.  We’re gonna expand on that, and do as much as we can while it’s possible.”  James folded his hands.  “So, this is partly an explanation, and partly me asking for anyone who wants to be part of this to get in touch with Karen early, as we start to set up a team for it.  Because our timeline is way shorter than you might think.”

“Any plans for passenger travel?”  Sarah asked.  “I feel like there’s a lot of potential there, since if the goal is pollution, airlines kinda honk, right?”

James grinned at her.  “They do  kinda honk.”  He agreed.  “I don’t have math on moving people yet.  Though I do have a really cool design for how we’d manage loading and unloading, which is to build a kind of Menacing Orb up on a very sturdy plinth with a set of three or four ‘floors’ inside and ramps leading to the different entrances.  For maximum people, since you can’t just stack bodies. Passengers funnel in, we flip the teleporter on schedule, and it gets transposed with another Menacing Orb from another… airport…”

“Airport?”

“I guess… I guess teleport is the proper term, at that point.”  James hummed.  “That sounds weird.  Anyway, the new Menacing Orb comes in, we push the ramps back into place - oh, the outer shell of the orb is just for safety margins - and everyone filters off.  You don’t actually need a lot of these spread across major international airports to effectively cut out the vast majority of aircraft.  We move a lot of people around, but when there’s no airtime, you don’t need to worry about having redundancies, or underused routes.”

Sarah steepled her fingers and leaned in toward him.  “I have an important question.”  She asked, and James gave her a look that indicated that he knew why he was here.  “Do you still do the ‘this is your captain speaking’ announcement on the Menacing Orb?  What about stewards handing out peanuts and cranberry juice?”

“Actually maybe ?”  James said.  “I was going to say no, because it would be an affectation, but there might legitimately be a need to allow for equalizing pressure between destinations, so there might be some downtime in the Orb.  Seems like a good use for it.”

“This all sounds pretty perfect.  What’s the catch?”  She prompted him.  Sarah liked to leave her questions wide open, but still focused in a certain direction.  In this case, what’s going to go wrong .

And James had to admit, there was a lot that could go wrong.  “I think the worst that can happen is that someone just tries to force us to hand them over.  Governments, specifically.  The… what did we call them? Logisticors? They have to be within a few meters of one of the sites being swapped, so we can’t just hide them in the Lair’s basement.  And while a lot of businesses and individually wealthy people might try to use financial or legal pressure to stop us, at the actual ‘getting stuff done’ level, my concern is a military unit arriving with guns and saying ‘give us the teleporter’.”

“You don’t think that cheap access to safer, faster travel is going to be a motivation to let us do our thing?”  Sarah asked.

Sarah, James knew, was an optimist.  But there was a limit to how far that optimism could go before it was naivete.  He didn’t want to make the podcast too dark, though.  “We’ll be, once we get ready to move, talking to a lot of people.  I think we can avoid it.  Talking solves a lot of problems, and offering something for essentially free probably helps.”  James caught himself drumming his fingers on the desk, and stopped himself by sitting on his hand.

“A lot of people,” Sarah said, “ probably find something compelling about building a better world with magic?”

James nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, absolutely!”  He said, and let that enthusiasm take over some of the darker tone in his words from earlier.  Though he still didn’t want to gloss over that.  “But there will be people who don’t.  We’ve got a lot of potential problems to watch out for, a lot of them on the literal security side of things.”  James considered for a second, and then decided against talking about how his person-transit idea of the Menacing Orb would be just as much of a soft target as any airplane would, for the purpose of people who wanted to just cause civilian casualties.

Ultimately, there was only so much you could do.  They’d do their best, and then some, and hope it would be enough to stop problems before they got too bad.

“Is this a good time to poke you about the other thing you’re here to talk about?”  Sarah asked leadingly.

“Oh!”  James brightened again.  “Yes!  Okay.  What have you told them?”

“Them?”  Sarah feigned confusion.

He made a huffing sound at her.  “Your audience.   The half the Order who listen to this.  That them.”

“Oh them !”  Sarah didn’t look the least bit put out.  “Jokes aside, we like to quick recaps for anyone who has to miss episodes.  So start from the top.”

James nodded.  That made sense, and he certainly appreciated that Sarah’s weekly update on things happening around the Order wasn’t gated to people who had the time to go through the growing archives.  “Alright.  Sarah didn’t introduce me this way, but my official title around here right now is ‘paladin’.  And I wanna talk a bit about what that means, and also the fact that we want more people with that title.  And your face says you have a question?”

“ Is this either a religious thing, or a D&D thing?”  Sarah made a pointed question of it, though with good humor.

“No, and… kinda also no but also yes.”  James admitted.  “So, when the Order started calling the people who responded to big problems knights, it was sort of a joke.  I think when people started calling me a paladin it was a joke too.  Fantasy terms, right?”  Sarah uttered an echo of agreement, and James continued.  “But there’s a seed of truth to it, too.  Knights are people who are trusted with power, along with the responsibilities that power brings.  And paladins…”

“Yeah, what is it that you do  around here?”

James couldn’t help but laugh at that.  “Everything!”  He exclaimed.  “A little bit of everything, actually.  We’re still sort of hashing out what’s needed, or actually wanted , and I look forward to your reading of listener input next week where people who are only just finding out about this send you a lot of off the wall ideas.  But in general, paladins of the Order of Endless Rooms will have three big tasks.”

Sarah cut in.  “Defend the innocent, seek the holy grail, and something about sexual repression?”

“Despite the name, we aren’t a literal chivalric order.”  He pointed out.

“We could be!  We could reinvent feudalism!”  Sarah said with happy sarcasm.

“Nope!”  James shot down her idea as fast as he could.  “Also, are you even allowed to say that?  Don’t kids listen to this show?”  James allowed his curiosity to take him on the tangent.

“It’s important to be honest and open without being lewd , James.”  Sarah chastised him.

He folded his arms at her.  “Aren’t you dating my girlfriend now?  I’m gonna get Alanna to-“

The threat was instantly intercepted as Sarah hauled the interview back on track through sheer force of personality.  “Tell me about the important tasks of a paladin!”

James chuckled softly.  “So, the first thing is communication.  Part of why it’s important to dabble in everything a little bit is that the internal part of the job is helping people talk to each other.  Sure, we’ve got a chat server and this podcast and other methods, but we’re growing.  And not everyone has time to follow thousand-message conversations.  So the first job is to listen , and to help facilitate getting information to where and who it needs to go to.”  James ticked off one of the fingers he was holding up.  “The second thing is external, and it’s to be the face of the Order of Endless Rooms.  Not a unilateral decision making power, but a representative, and a diplomat.  The people who meet with other groups, whether they’re like us, or just mundane governments, companies, or agencies.  And part of that is a feedback loop; the idea is for paladins to uphold the core ethics of the Order, while also helping guide those ethics forward.”  He gave her a look that showed a deep disappointment with the world.  “Because you know we’re going to keep running into moral grey areas, and that’s just the sort of thing we need to be ready to act on and work through as best we can.”

“It’s true, we’re kind of in a messy situation just by existing.”  Sarah gave a return nod.  “It’s been talked about before on this show about the Order’s place in a world that is already wholly owned by other forces, and what it means to be a citizen.  And we - we the Order, usually not me directly - make a lot of decisions that, for example, the US federal government might disagree with!  Like, do you know how many undocumented immigrants are in this building right now?”

“Probably at least eighty?”  James guessed.  “We’re counting ratroaches and camracondas, right?  Which, I mean, I don’t think we should.  They were technically born in the US.  They’re undocumented citizens  by the constitution, since the constitution doesn’t specify that humanity is needed, though then there’s a bunch of tacked on laws that… this isn’t important.  I get what you mean.”

Sarah wanted to follow that line of conversation, but also knew they’d be here all night if she let either of the people in the room follow every tangent that they came up with.  It was how she and James had become friends in the first place, and it just was not helpful for this kind of interview.  “Back on track!”  She declared.  “You keep saying ‘we’ and ‘paladins’.  You obviously aren’t talking about only yourself.”

“Oh, yes!”  James straightened up in his seat and went back to his point.  “We need more people who do what I do.  So we’re looking for volunteers who want to try to step into the role.  I’ve got a short list, so do a few other people I trust.  But it’s open to anyone, and I want to give everyone a fair shot at it.  There’s no extra pay, a lot of extra work, and it’s often very dangerous.  Though you do end up with some weird magic.  And, I want to make this clear, this is open to anyone.   Species, qualifications, age… okay, well, you need to be at least eighteen.  And yes, I can already hear some people wondering if we should let teenagers have power, and I just want to say, we have some relentlessly impressive kids around here.  Room for growth, but we all have that.”  He sighed into the microphone.  “But yeah.  Get your applications in!”

“Wait, hang on.”  Sarah thought back over what James had just said, augmented memory making it pretty easy to recall details of the whole conversation.  “You said three things. Also, you keep saying it’ll be dangerous.  What’s the third?”

It was the leading question to end all leading questions.  But James didn’t mind, the countdown clock for how long they wanted this interview to go was running low anyway.  Conversations like this could be fun, but didn’t work to actually give people an overview of what was happening around the Order if they were so long that no one had time to listen.

“The third thing.”  James pursed his lips.  “First, communication.  Second, representation.  And third… well.  The hard job is to find problems, and solve them.”  He gave a single breathy laugh.  “It sounds easy when I say it like that.  And it won’t always be risking life and limb.  Ideally it would never be.  But the job of a paladin is the extension of our desire to help people.  Find the people or circumferences that are causing harm , and stop them.  Save lives, fight injustice, push the Order to keep fixing everything we can.”

“Big asks.”  Sarah said softly.

“They are.”  James answered in the same tone of voice.  “That’s what we’re looking for, though.  Not just people who will react, but people who can stand up for the ideals we hold, and who can guide us to the future.  Not all at once, not alone.  But still…”

“Heavy.”  Sarah nodded.  “Okay, last question.  If you’re a paladin, do you get to have a title? Like, are we bringing back sir or dame for knights?”

“We’re not remaking feudalism, Sarah!”  James threw his hands up, even knowing no one listening could hear that, because the gesture was important to get the right comically abrupt indignant tone.  

“Well, this has been productive.  We’ve all learned a lot today, and I’m sure James will be getting a lot of emails soon.”  Sarah ignored the fact that James was shaking his head with a wide eyed look that indicated that he was not the person to email.  “So, any closing thoughts?”  Sarah asked.  “Any fun new magic in your life?”

“I’m thinking of turning myself into a half-Komodo-dragon-half-moth with the shaper substance.”  James admitted.

Sarah stared at him.  “…Why?”  She asked, seeming torn between genuine curiosity and utter bafflement.  “I mean, we are friends.  I’ve known you my whole life.  I deeply love you.  This makes perfect sense, coming out of your mouth, but why ?”

“Mothgirls are in vogue right now.”  James answered.

“That just raises even more actual questions, James!”  Sarah burst out.

He nodded at her.  “You know, Alanna said the same thing?  Anyway, thanks for listening everyone!  Check in next week for Sarha’s next episode where she’ll be interviewing Deng Boquin about the development of Response’s training program!”

“No, James, you don’t get to choose when we do breaks in the audio!  This is my show and I will not-!”

The production assistant chose that moment as the best time to cut the episode.  Sarah and James both agreed that it was suitably hilarious.

_____

A week went by.  Then another.

James didn’t stop delving, despite trying to take it easy.  He didn’t redo the feat of running four different delves over three days again, but he spent some time in the dungeons.  Especially guiding new people through.

He did get a fairly long Officium Mundi delve in though.  Although it could be considered to be one of the most peaceful delves he’d ever done.  James had, ever since he realized just how alive  the life in the dungeons was, tried to minimize how much actual violence he perpetrated.  But this delve was pacifist even by his standards.

The group of himself, two newly hired humans, and one of the inhabitors who had expressed an interest, had taken a winding path through beige cubicles and towering central columns that propped up a distant ceiling.  But between drone scouting and a few sharpened senses, and also some soft words and gentle motions from James, they managed to either avoid or placate practically anything that would have tried to fight them.

Their path took them somewhat deep into the officescape dungeon, a couple passing as they kept up a steady pace with minimal resistance.  The strangest thing they encountered was, to James, a complete novelty; a set of stairs  leading up through an open portion of the ceiling.  They’d climbed cautiously, and been met with a mezzanine surrounded by hundreds of low walled cubicles, fanned out in a semicircle arc, all focused around a single massive decision tree.

James had shown the others how to approach and get the attention of the little LED shard monitor lizards, and trade them yellows for purples.  They used up the few of the orbs they’d collected there, and then headed back.

The orbs had been put into one of the replicator rituals, wedged in the corners under a pair of stacked brass and steel mechanisms that looked like a collection of overlapping gears.  Momo had pointed out that he still hadn’t told her how many of these things to make, and James told her he’d let her know when to stop.  Then he’d split the replicated purples with his tour group, taking one for himself, and also at Momo’s promoting, using the replicated green from the Ceaseless Stacks, just to see what it was and if she should make more.

[Shell Upgraded : +28 mg Caffeine Processing - Beneficial]

[+1 Material Rank : Rock - Gemstone - Semiprecious - Lapis Lazuli]

“What the fuck are we supposed to do with that ?”  Momo had demanded.  “I was hoping it was like the Officium Mundi greens, and it would bless this tower with an elevator!”  Momo had a vocal hatred for having to climb twenty sloped ramps just to get to the overhead projector she worked the replication magic through.  Though her calves had never looked better.

“Welp.”  James had said, folding his arms.  “I dunno how many orb colors the Library has, but I can tell you now one of them is for plants.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”  Momo had asked with a glare that wasn’t really meant for him.

“Animal, vegetable, mineral.”  James said with a ‘whatcha gonna do about it’ shrug of his shoulders.  “The classic.”

Momo had kicked him out of the tower.

Other delves passed with far less note.  He went with Kirk and Dorothy, the ex-horizonists that were part of the group that spent a lot of time exploring and mapping Route Horizon, to check on the radio beacon that had been left in the dungeon before James had been magically kidnapped.  Dorothy drove, the woman looking like she’d have fit right in with James’ grandma’s old ikebana club with her panama hat and turtle shell sunglasses.

Route Horizon rearranged itself far more often than other dungeons, but it did so with a pattern that could be mapped out a lot easier.  And, as their expedition was set to prove, it should be possible to just off-road to wherever you needed to be, if you knew what direction to go.

They’d cut a mostly straight line across the rocky desert, with all three of the navigators that were paired with the delvers sprawling out around the car to dance in what might be the closest things the infomorphs had to natural forms, pointing out the worst rocks or potential course corrections.  And when they’d found the train tracks, they’d followed the half-buried route back to where it got close to a road, stopping to leave more beacons for a large scale expedition to follow up on.  James was really looking forward to that; he wanted to see if he could board a train, even though he knew that was stupidly dangerous.

The group had stopped a few times on the way back, after finding a highway and referencing their shift maps against a couple landmarks.  Once for an isolated stretch of power line that had what looked like a dozen perfectly normal crows sitting on it, and once for a parking structure.  James had used the Status Quo earring he’d added to his daily kit to stealth his way into the taller building and make off with one of the Velocity gears, and splitting it with the other two had doubled his capacity for the magic.

He had three Horizon spells now, after all.  And it felt weird to not have an actual reserve of the mana that they all used.

And if they were lucky on the torn chunk of a neighborhood map they found, an ancient flier fluttering in the wind stapled to a mile marker by the side of the road, then maybe the Order could add a third common spell to their collective globes.

James had missed another delve of both the Ceaseless Stacks, and Officium Mundi, just due to sleep schedule drift.  He could have forced himself awake, but that seemed like a bad idea in his still healing condition.  So instead, he spent his energy on other things.  A big part of it actually being training and conditioning.

Small group tactics, different forms of combat, marksmanship - that last one wasn’t especially relevant to James, or so he thought .  Nate had given him some choice words about his opinion that James was wasting his potential; skill ranks and Sewer stats pushed him to be better, but imagine what he could do if he tried .  So he’d started running drills, even though he wasn’t sure he was actually improving.

The exercise potions also let James compress weeks or months of serious workouts into days.  Though he wasn’t pushing his body that hard; the potions couldn’t really ‘heal’ beyond just maximizing the natural recovery from exercise.  Wounds, bruises, mental exhaustion, they didn’t do much for that.  But he still put in the effort to keep himself in the best physical condition he’d ever been in.

He napped in the sunbeams of Clutter Ascent, and threw himself eagerly into the scenery puzzles the dungeon created, and he read some of his favorite short stories to the growing attic dungeon.  Well, the dungeon, and also the ten or twenty young stuff animals that gathered to listen to him as well.  Half of them leaned harder on the raccoon part of their heritage, while the other half into the salamander.  All of them had the spider features turned down, which James felt was a shame.  Fredrick, the first of their people, was… unique.  And he hoped that didn’t make the older creature feel alone.  James was pretty sure the dungeon had made the change because Fredrick was self conscious and worried about his own heavy spider influence on his biology, which he understood, but…

Well, he didn’t know what the right answer was.  Not that there even was an ‘answer’, just different paths forward.

At one point, he sat down with Karen when the older woman had asked to talk to him. It was oddly personal, and felt out of place, but she’d dived in with typical bluntness. “My daughter wants to court two… people.”  She’d said. James had just given her an increasing look, leaning forward on the desk until she’d actually phrased a question for him. “My… husband and I,” James had caught the pause when Karen spoke about her lost family, “might have had a somewhat ‘open’ relationship compared to some. But not this. How do I be supportive?”

It wasn’t the question James had expected.  “Honestly?  I don’t really know.”  He’d answered.  “I guess if I were telling my parents, what I’d want was for them to not be weird about it.  Tell her you’ll be there if she needs help, I guess?  Honestly, Karen, poly relationships aren’t that special.”

“Even when I disapprove of one of her choices?”

“Morgan isn’t that bad.  I assume Morgan is… actually that’s not really my business.”  James said, and then waved off Karen’s next comment to continue. “You’re her mom. You were always gonna be a little disapproving.  Which no kid ever likes, and I assume you can remember living through.”  Karen nodded slowly. “So even though you know better, let her live the experience.  That’s all.”

Karen had made a comment about James being older than he seemed, which he chose to take as a complement. He’d answered a few of her niche questions about relationship terminology, and then fled the room when she started trying to get him to explain youth slang.

At one point, James took a break.  A real  break.  He spent three - well, two and a half - days at home playing video games that he hadn’t had any free time for, and he ordered pizza, and didn’t really talk to anyone.  It could have felt lonely, but really, because of how easy it would have been to not be alone if he wanted it, it instead just felt relaxing.  It also wasn’t entirely a break.  He spent hours during that time trying to figure out how to absorb an orange orb from Officium Mundi, though he got nowhere with it.

One day, when he was sitting in the Lair and reading a book on the history of the internet and slowly putting points into his computer science lesson from the Akashic Sewer, Momo had found him and asked when he was going to use his skill points from his ordeal in the Suburb dungeon.  James had, actually, kind of forgotten about them.  Which was weird on its own, and had sent Momo racing off to find Planner and Speaky and any other infomorph she could get her brain cells on so that she could hunt down any trace of an antimeme.

James didn’t have the heart to tell her that he just forgot things a lot.  He was pretty sure this was mundane.  Zhu had protested that he had also forgotten, and that was kind of weird, and James had given the feathery manifestation a reassuring pet as he pointed out that Zhu was probably exactly as forgetful as James was.

“Well that’s horrifying.”  Zhu had said. “Because you have a memory upgrade and you still forget people’s names.”

“But not the grocery list anymore!”  James cheerfully replied, cracking his book back open as Zhu wrapped a glowing wing around the two of them.  “Also, let’s make it worse; I  have the shell upgrade.   You get all my shitty memory without the benefit of dungeon magic.”

“Get me a copy of that orb.”  Zhu’s demand had been grumbled partly as a joke.  But it had been timed well enough that James had just given an accepting nod, texted the right person, and gotten Zhu a copy of that orb.

As it turned out, navigators could  crack purple orbs.  It wasn’t clear what exactly was the shell being upgraded, but quick testing seemed to indicate the upgrades persisted across manifestations.  It was only after they’d messed around with it together for a day or two that James had found a Research report on exactly that, and learned that half the informorphs in the Order had been using orbs for a while.

“I’m sorry , okay?”  He’d apologized to Zhu with a chastised sense of shame.  “I forgot !  That’s literally what caused this in the first place!”

His navigator’s feathers had poofed out like an indignant canary.  “Unbelievable.”  Zhu’s voice wasn’t especially serious, but he made a show of the whole conversation.  “You are the worst boyfriend.”

“Wait, we’re dating?!”  James had been a bit surprised.

“No, but the fact that you believe that you could have forgotten that proves my point!”  Zhu didn’t elaborate on what his point was.  “I am going to sleep.  Wake me when the others get home.”  He’d shivered against James’ skin, a tingling feeling as the orange light that made up his feathers and eyes had burned away to nothing.

James had made sure not to forget to do that.

He didn’t manage to level up any of his lessons in the time period, despite an Office orb about fish that boosted his Biology lesson by about fifty points.  But he still learned a few new things that he felt were useful in the process.  Also the history of the internet was cool, and he got twenty or so points closer to learning what the Computer Science lesson gave.

When he was recording his progress in the central database the Order kept for the lessons, he noticed that a few other people had leveled up, and there was an interesting pattern.  A given lesson, no matter what kind of book it came from, seemed to always give the same three options.  Someone had leveled up Reading, and gotten the three choices that the kid who they’d found the Sewer through in the first place had gotten all that time ago.  They’d picked Understanding, which James approved of.  But what really caught his attention was that someone had leveled Computer Science before.

So he had a lot of time to decide, ahead of time, if he wanted Study, Energy, or Composure.

Those were all so vague, and the notes were no help at all.  But James had to stifle two yawns while reading, so he felt like he knew what he was going to go for.

Unrelated to that, he learned how to weld.

That was weird, because it was one of James’ first experiences unpacking a skill file through the skulljack.  He’d made one, for fencing, and had done what he thought was a pretty good job.  But he hadn’t had much time to dabble with the process, since he’d been eternally busy and also nearly dead.

But other people had kept dabbling.  And the results were starting to get impressive and a little worrying , but not worrying enough that James didn’t still love it.

They couldn’t figure out how to blend memory files from two people yet, but they could  take the time to compose a .mem (or maybe a .skill?) from two people who were connected to each other.  The file the Order had for welding had taken eighteen hours to put together, including the people who were temporarily one person going through actual motions so they could create fresh memories of what they were doing and why that they could hang deeper experience on.

When James consumed it, it took eight minutes to transfer through the skulljack braid, and then when he began unpacking it, it… well, skulljacks didn’t have much of a UI, so he didn’t even know how long it took, or if it had a loading bar hidden somewhere.

And then later that night, he’d just kind of casually known the difference between TIG and SMAW, and the appropriate times to use a lap joint versus a butt joint.

But more than just the information, he felt… changed.  A change he recognized in himself, in some ways, and he recognized that the recognition was coming from the enhanced emotional resonance he got from a variety of red orbs.  From those small points of realization, he could map the whole of the change in his thoughts; and if he wanted to, he felt like he could have pushed back on it.

But he didn’t want to.  Because the feelings that came with the knowledge weren’t overwhelming, and they were also constructive.  The simple joy of making something, the satisfaction of working with his hands, the feeling of power from being someone who built the world.

No emotion was entirely positive.  But if James could pick something to broadcast into everyone’s mind in the world all at once, this would be on his short list.

Ultimately, he didn’t know when he’d need to weld anything.  But if anyone ever needed him, he was available now.  And that was what a paladin was for.

Also if they ever found a Sewer lesson for shop class, this one file would probably spike someone a whole level or two.

_____

James wasn’t recovered.  There were sore remnants of bruises just under his skin all across his body, he felt like he couldn’t sleep enough to ever stop being tired, and apparently the act of eating lunch was enough to exhaust him recently.  But he didn’t need to be recovered to enjoy himself.

Delves weren’t the only way he filled his days, either.  James just wasn’t someone who wanted to be doing things every waking hour.  Or so he’d thought.  He used to love downtime, just playing video games and watching youtube videos in the background.  But he had a theory about himself that, now that he actually had things he found exciting and interesting, his downtime included a lot more other people than before.  

He spent time with his partners, sharing meals and talking about what they’d been up to.  Anesh’s visit to his parents had gone… about as well as expected when you tell an older pair of pseudo-traditionalist Indian parents that you’d cloned yourself.  Anesh had admitted he’d left off being some kind of bisexual, and polyamorous, because the clone thing was enough of a shock, and James had half-jokingly accused him of fabricating excuses.  Alanna, meanwhile, was having a great time showing her sisters the world she lived in.  She also admitted that she’d go back to being annoyed by them at some point, but for now, being able to overwhelm people with a new species or spell at every turn helped keep the air of mystery she was cultivating.  That, and also she and Sarah were spending a lot of time together, which made James’ heart swell when he saw them.

James also did small chores around the Lair and on days when he felt like walking was a big ask he helped out with paperwork in the same building he’d used to have a normal job in.  He learned more about the process of guesswork and refinement that they used to look for new potions.  He listened to the growing construction crew complain about power hookups in the building.  He spent a whole afternoon just listening to Offspring albums with Keeka and enjoying the ratroach’s newly unlocked endless enthusiasm.

And the whole time, he talked to people.  Small conversations about where they wanted the Order to go, and where they were right now.  How they felt about things, and how he could help.  What they could change, and what they absolutely would not compromise on.

James wasn’t stupid.  He knew not everyone would agree with his vision of utopia.  But the Order was a really, really good way to slowly draw in and convert people to his way of thinking.  What started as an almost accidental level of respect from under a hundred survivors of Officium Mundi had proved to be a very solid foundation to build on when it came to inducting new members.  It also helped that they were already working as a proof of concept for a multispecies operation.

And slowly, bit by bit, James recovered.  Not fully, but maybe eighty percent.  Enough that the delves he was still going on against all common sense left him tired but not dead on his feet.  Which meant it was the perfect time for something to come up.

“Hey.”  JP had called him when he was standing in the Lair’s ground floor waiting for the elevator, probably a hundred feet away from where his friend actually was right now.  “Get your ass up here.  I need you for a thing.”

“Sure.”  James said, stepping between the trio of young camracondas that were waiting behind him as he pivoted.  He assumed they were young anyway; most of the ones with the sleeker camera heads and the LED spines were more recently liberated from the dungeon.  “What hat am I wearing today?”

There was a brief pause as James circled the front wall to make his way to the door into their back briefing warehouse, where he just kind of automatically assumed JP was waiting.  When his friend spoke next, it was a simple word, and it made James stop smirking.  Both because of what was said, and because JP had dropped his normal tone of someone who constantly sounded like they were just a little sarcastic and mocking, and replaced it with someone who was all business.

“Paladin.”  He said.

James paused with his hand on the door.  He stared at the back of his fingers, still not looking quite familiar with the tiny scar he’d had since he was six years old now missing.  Then he took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.  “I’ll be right there.”  He answered.

Then he hung up, and pushed the door open, and got to work.