“Hey.”

Sam came back to consciousness slowly, almost luxuriantly. The blackness of dreamless sleep slid off of him like a warm blanket, and he surfaced like a great leviathan breaching the surface for the first time in ages.

“Hey.”

His muscles all felt relaxed and happy, like he’d spent the last ten years on a massage table. His mind was still as a mountain lake, his heart rate slow and untroubled. For the first time in… Gods, had it only been a couple weeks? For the first time since the earthquake, he felt utterly, deliciously rested.

“Hey.”

Someone was trying to get his attention. For a second he considered replying, opening his eyes and abandoning the hedonistic feel of doing absolutely nothing. But the bed was soft, the pillow was firm, and for now he just wanted to luxuriate.

“Butter-boy, I know you’re awake. If you don’t open your eyes and sit up, I will hit you in the face with a brick.”

Sally.

Sam’s eyes snapped open and he practically levitated himself into a sitting position with no musculature actually involved in the movement.

“I’m awake!” he cried a bit desperately, eyes rolling wildly side to side, looking for the antagonistic core and taking in the details of his surroundings at the same time.

He was in the infirmary again. Lord, he should just make this his room, the amount of times he wound up in here. Several of the beds around him were filled with wounded. A couple gnomes with heavily-bandaged extremities. A goblin missing an ear and an eye. And down at the end, a shield maiden with heavy burn scarring over almost half of her body.

Guilt shot through him, and he winced. He had no call taking up a bed in here when there were real casualties—

Casualties.

“Sally!” He shot to his feet, throwing aside bedcovers. “The invaders! Did we win? Are we still fighting? I’ve got to get—“

A gentle pressure in the center of his chest pushed him back down onto the bed, and Sally came floating around from the opposite side of the bed and into his field of vision.

“Okay, two things. First, put some pants on. No one needs to see that. Second, it’s cool. We won. Took some losses, but your mom and dad and that Diana chick and the dragon were enough to drive off the attackers.”

Sam didn’t even waste energy on blushing as he reached over and grabbed his trousers from the back of a nearby chair and tugged them on, covering his shame. “Tell me what’s going on. What happened.”

“No.”

Sam blinked halfway through doing up his fly. “What?”

“No. Things are handled, and you’ve got people taking care of anything that still needs handling. You don’t need to worry about that stuff right now. And as the offensive piece of this little team, it’s my job to tell you to sit the fuck down and let other people take care of the shit you don’t need to be taking care of yourself right now.”

“Oh-kay…” Sam nodded slowly, watching the hovering core carefully. “So why did you wake me up then?”

“Because there is something we need your help on. It’s just not any of the invading-army-slash-defending-the-wall stuff. Finish putting your wedding tackle away and then we can talk turkey.”

“Is this where I’m supposed to make a ‘choking the chicken’ joke?” Sam asked with a wry smirk.

“You’ve been spending too much time around me.”

He finished getting his pants on, and even took a minute to breathe deep and put on a shirt too, then stood back up and exhaled. “Okay. What’s the problem?”

“Bonebag is still stuck in Sephie’s mind-dungeon thing. He’s been caterwauling for the last hour how it’s actually a trap and he walked right into it like a dumbass.”

Sam blinked and looked up from pulling on his boots. “A trap?”

“Yeah. Like the Red Room. Remember?”

That got a wince. Yeah, he remembered. Minotaurs and alarms and— “Is Araxes safe?”

“We think so. Sephie isn’t saying anything. Must be some whacked out security protocol none of us remembers. I think she’s gone dormant to protect herself. And the bonebag is convinced that there’s no way out for him from inside.”

“Right. Can you or Cora get into Persephone’s head? Like you did to get me out of the Red Room?”

“Nope,” Sally sounded like she was grinding teeth she didn’t have. “She’s not even responding to us. Whatever security protocols got engaged bit down hard. Could you hurry up? Please?”

“Right.” Boots laced up, pants belted, fly zipped, shirt on… Sam stopped and blinked a couple times as a new thought occurred to him.

“Hey Sally? How come I was naked?”

“I dunno. Cora was the one who sat with you all night, maybe ask her?”

He didn’t blush. He was positive he didn’t blush. And no one was going to convince him otherwise, especially not some gutter-brained core with the most lewd snicker he’d ever heard in his life.

“Alright, where is everyone?”

“In that new lab of yours, lover-boy. Rashun, Boney, and my sister have all been working through the night trying to figure it out.”

“Let’s go then.”

* * *

But they didn’t go, not immediately. The wounded called to him—not with their own voices but with his. It wasn’t the guilt that made him stop by each bed and offer what words he could. At least, that was not the only reason.

Someone had to remember.

The shieldmaiden was the worst for him. She had been pretty in a strong-jawed kind of way. Now half of her face looked like melted wax, and her head had been shaved clear of hair. Two healers sat next to her, pumping healing spells into her at regular intervals along with fluids and other medical things he didn’t undertand.

It was probably chauvinistic, a little voice in his head muttered, to feel that what had happened to her was worse because she was a girl. But damn him if it still didn’t make it hurt to look at her.

I’ll make it right somehow, he promised quietly. She wouldn’t have heard him if he’d said it out loud. But he fancied that as he made the promise, her breathing became a little easier. It was probably all in his head.

Sally was quiet as he visited each of the wounded. She didn’t even begin vibrating with impatience until the last few seconds. Finally, with a nod at the healers, he turned away and sucked in his breath.

“Okay. Now we can go.”

“Right. Follow me.”

They exited the infirmary and headed straight down the corridor towards the stairs. Around them, the dungeon was humming along. It was both strangely disquieting and… oddly liberating, in a way. He’d been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours straight, and nothing had fallen apart without his direct input.

Well, okay, technically several sections of wall, a dozen dead fighters, a catatonic core, and a trapped lich. But that all would have happened if I’d been around anyways.

And they’d fought without him this time. Even though he’d been fighting in his dreams… It hadn’t really affected the battle. He’d been 100% out of touch this time, and the whole dungeon had managed well without him.

A part of him wondered, as he and Sally dodged around a trio of gnomes hurrying in the opposite direction, if that meant he wasn’t needed around here anymore?

The question was still sitting in his mind like a lead ball when they mounted the stairs, hung a left, and got to the lab space he’d set up the day before. The door was standing open, and he could hear voices coming from inside. Rashun’s he recognized, and Cora. And Ma and Pop. And Pearl. But there was another voice he wasn’t familiar with, high-pitched and obviously excited about something.

“That’s Plura,” Sally said as they approached the open door. “She’s a gnome that got generated and freed while you were asleep. Apparently she was really big into dimensional theory back before God decided to fuck the entire world over. She’s been trying to help Sparky with the whole ‘connect a dimensional portal to where-the-hell-ever’, but it hasn’t been working great. I think—“

A sudden high-pitched whine and a stink of ozone erupted from the lab, cutting Sally off and making the hairs on Sam’s arms stand on end. He let out a yelp and bolted for the door, turning and getting inside the lab just in time to see the dimensional anchor he’d worked so hard to build start spinning out of control.

“This is fine!” A little gnome woman in a white lab coat squealed as she pulled levers and turned dials on the workbench. “It’s, uh, supposed to do that! I promise!”

“It doesn’t sound fine, Plura!” Pearl squeaked from where she was hovering in a corner of the room near the ceiling. “It sounds like it’s gonna summon demons to eat our souls and all our chocolate!”

“I don’t know what’s going on!” That was Rashun, wide-eyed and pale-scaled on the other side of the bench from the gnome. “I put in the numbers you gave me, but it’s not—“

“MOVE,” Sam roared and dashed forward, hip-checking the gnome out of the way with probably more force than was strictly necessary, sending her bouncing off a secondary workstation and then rolling half the length of the lab.

“It’s a cascade overload,” he said, eyes taking in the dial readings in an instant. “Rashun, red lever, pull it until it stops. Then turn the ‘Temporal Battery’ dial counterclockwise until you feel resistance.”

“Right!” The kobold boy leaped to obey as Sam started working feverishly to undo what was happening before it exploded and took half the mountain along with it.

“Sam! You’re awake!” Pearl sounded happy.

“Hi Pearl. Hi guys. Be with you in a minute.” The problem was the dimensional connector was trying to connect to an ‘address’ that existed but was somehow blocked. The energy readings he was getting were crazy-high, and the dampening field could only divert so much… He had to bleed it off somewhere.

“Pop,” he said, not looking up. He’d seen the elder Tolliver standing close to Rashun when he came in.

“What do you need?” Pop asked without hesitation.

Sam yanked Thumb Bane from his belt and tossed it to its former owner. “Make a hole in the east wall. Keep going until you hit daylight. Then get out of the way.”

“Thermal vent?” Pop knew the ins-and-outs of construction, didn’t he just.

“Yeah. Hurry.”

“Right.”

Sam was sweating as his hands danced over the controls, shunting power, keeping it flowing back and forth, not giving it time to build up in any one capacitor in the workbench, and over the whole thing the swirling vortex of the dimensional connector pulsed and writhed in the grips of the energies pouring through it.

“Sam!” Pop’s voice came from somewhere to the left. “Clear!”

“On the way! Rashun, pull the green lever as hard as you can!” Sam watched the kobold child yank the lever down, then reached over and yanked a similar lever on his side of the bench.

Raw energy howled out of the workbench and seared its way through the room to the east, impacted against the wall, then found the vent his pop had just carved and blasted down and out the side of the mountain to dissipate harmlessly in the atmosphere. Probably cooking a few dozen birds on its way, but hey, that’s the price you pay for certain evolutionary advantages.

The quiet that descended on the lab after that was palpable. Sam slumped over the workbench controls, glancing at the readings and seeing they were back within tolerances. Across from him, Rashun was breathing heavily and his eyes were so wide they were in danger of dropping out of his head.

Slowly, Sam stood up straight. Slowly he turned, and slowly he lowered his eyebrows in a glare at the little gnome still laying upside down where she’d fetched up against a tablesaw, her eyes wide and her mouth open.

“So, uh, I guess it was a bad idea to try and connect the dimensional bridge to the knowledge core to try and get Araxes out, huh?” she said, staring at Sam.

“Hi Sweetie,” Ma said from the side where she’d just stood watching everything unfold. “Did you have a nice nap?”

The more things change, the more they stay the same, Sam thought with a sigh.