Serenity woke up from his dreamwalk and nap to the sound of his phone alarm. It was midnight and the camp was quiet, though he could easily tell he was not the only person awake.
Dr. Mattingly’s “office” tent was dark and empty. Serenity considered for a moment, then headed towards the portal. If there was a problem with him heading down, she should have told him, and he really did want to check out the portal.
Serenity didn’t see anyone until he arrived in the cave.
“Who’s there?” A short, chubby dark-haired woman looked up from her laptop as he floated into the cave. She looked around, then muttered to herself, “Damn, I was sure someone came in.”
That was interesting; she’d noticed him without knowing what she’d noticed, even though she couldn’t see him in the poorly-lit cave. Even more interesting, he thought he recognized her.
Serenity drifted over near one of the cave openings, then shifted to his human shape. “Morwen?”
Her head whipped around towards him. “Who - how do you know my name?”
Serenity stepped forward into the light. It had to be Morwen; otherwise she wouldn’t react that way.
Morwen stood up, moved around the table, and walked over to Serenity. “Thomas? I didn’t know you were working for DARPA.” She looked him up and down. “You look just like you did in college. Well, maybe a bit more in shape; when did you start working out?”
Serenity smiled and shook his head. “If you think I look just like I did in college, we need better light in here. I don’t work for DARPA.” No, he owed her more of an explanation than that. “I go by Serenity these days. I guess you’re the one monitoring stuff tonight?”
“Shiiiit.” Morwen stared at him.
“Earth to Morwen?” Serenity waved his hand in front of her face. Morwen started laughing the way she always had when he did that.
“My God. I’ve met your Dad - hells, we had dinner at your parents’ almost once a week when we dated! Why didn’t I realize?” Morwen’s expression went from amused to slightly horrified as she spoke.
Serenity shook his head. “You moved on. We both did.” He deliberately softened his tone. “So how is life treating you?”
Morwen seemed to shake herself. “Well enough, I suppose. I had to leave my little girl with her father to come out here. I got to go through the Tutorial a couple weeks ago; it was kind of fun, kind of not. I had more fun with magic than I thought I would, which is saying something. Nothing like what I’m hearing about you, though; you’ve gone and gotten famous. And … have wings?” She leaned to the side and looked at Serenity’s obviously wingless back.
“They get in the way in tight spaces. I have enough shapeshifting ability to drop them - well, multiform technically.” Serenity was confident Morwen would remember the difference between shapeshift and multiform. “I’m doing pretty well. Busy with this whole thing.” Serenity waved his hand in the air. “Strange times. Rissa accepted my proposal and we have a child on the way, though, so times are good.”
Morwen spoke without pausing for thought. “Is your kid going to have wings?”
Serenity froze. He hadn’t even considered that. Had she gotten pregnant before the undead city or afterwards? Even if it was before, had he affected the species of his unborn child when he changed Rissa’s?
It took him a moment to speak. “Probably, but we don’t know for sure yet.”
Serenity didn’t want to talk about that anymore. Fortunately, there was a convenient reason to change topics. “I’m down here to look into the portal. I just wanted to warn you that there will probably be some interference with your sensors.”
Morwen looked disappointed as she stepped back. “Right. I’ll … make a note.”
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Serenity started with teasing apart the various sections of the portal he’d found in the Messenger’s Magic book. He hadn’t had time to get into anything past the top-level summaries, but even that little was enough to get an idea for how a portal spell could be structured.
It was definitely an item-based spell. The mana input was connected to a reservoir, just like the book suggested. It was an easy vulnerability; if he disrupted the connection, the spell would fail. The book noted that it would sometimes fail explosively as all of the magic remaining in the reservoir was released at once, but it didn’t have any guidelines for how to manage that.
Serenity started digging for the location coordinates. They didn’t seem to be where the book had suggested they probably would be; instead, there was a hook that led to an entirely unrelated piece of the spell. Serenity was still trying to figure out how that made sense when a message from Aide appeared.
Status Update: Secondary scan complete. Very-low-frequency pattern confirmed. Additional pattern detected in very-high-frequency wavelengths. Commencing pattern analysis.
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Show me the patterns.
Serenity watched them for a minute. They didn’t make much sense to him, but he hadn’t expected them to. What he needed to do was match them to the magic and see if he could find a magical oscillation that matched; if he could, it’d be a possible way to detect them magically.
Oh, and remind me to ask about the high-frequency pattern when we’re done here. They should have noticed it.
Reminder set.
Serenity watched the two signals. He knew Aide had already done some processing on them to separate them from the carrier signals; after that, he could see the complex pattern but not decipher it into a meaning. That didn’t matter if all he was going to use it for was a detector, but it would still be nice to know what it was transmitting.
No, wait. Can you put the stuff on the higher frequency pattern in a document on my phone? I’ll pass it to Morwen and have her look into it while I look for a magical match.
Done
Serenity pulled the phone out of his pocket, glanced at it to make sure the screen showed what he was expecting, and turned to Morwen. “Morwen? Take a look at this.”
“Huh?” Morwen’s voice sounded half-sleepy as she looked up from her laptop. “What is it?”
Serenity set the phone next to Morwen. “A second frequency range that looks interesting.”
“That’s all I get? Interesting?” Morwen sounded annoyed, but Serenity noticed that she picked up the phone and was already looking at it. “Hey, can you email this to me instead?”
Serenity smiled. “Sure, what’s your email?”
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It took Serenity hours to match the patterns to anything in the portal’s spellform. Some of the time was because the spellform was similar to some he knew but different enough to be unfamiliar, but most of the time was spent figuring out how to match up the patterns to anything.
The high-frequency patterns were simply leakage as far as Serenity could tell. They weren’t actually coming from the spellform as such; instead, they were coming from the interface at the portal’s edge. They weren’t exactly physical but seemed instead to be triggered when anything passed through the portal - air in the case of this portal.
Serenity surfaced long enough after that discovery to ask Morwen if there was any equipment there yet to test the local air quality or composition. It wasn’t there yet; Morwen hadn’t heard when it would arrive.
Still, that told him that the signals were probably inescapable with any active portal, and would probably be better for localization than the other signal.
The low-frequency pattern was even more difficult to pin down. The entire spellform pulsed weakly as Serenity watched; it was difficult for him to even see, and he was quite good with observing mana flows and spellforms. It was a skill that (once he realized he still had it) didn’t seem to have degraded at all from his previous precision.
It still had to originate somewhere, and Serenity eventually traced it back to a small section of the spellform: the destination circuits. They weren’t laid out at all the way he’d have expected from the information in the first portal book and he hadn’t had time to read up on them in the new one, but that was still what they had to be.
He thought he might be able to translate them with some more research, but for now all he could do was identify that they were the source of the signal. It had to be related to how Tzintkra had identified the portals on Earth.
Serenity was debating what to do next when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to look, only to see Morwen standing next to him, yawning. “What?”
“It’s seven. I’m headed to dinner and bed; you probably should too.” Morwen covered her mouth, poorly concealing another yawn.
“I’d like to stay here as long as I’m not interfering. I think I’ve figured out the EM signal stuff, but I want to see if there’s a longer-distance magical signal I’m missing. There almost has to be.” Something to do with the destination area seemed logical, but it meant hours of digging through the spellform, looking for something with a deliberate transmission capability. You didn’t get anything at an interstellar distance without either some real power behind it or a very specific Affinity and either way, there would be a spellform section for it.
Morwen nodded as she tried to suppress another yawn. “I’ll tell the Boss-lady. Need to tell her about the high-frequency stuff you found too, she’s going to want to pull in some more equipment.”
She paused for a moment and seemed to gather her courage. “How’d you like to go out for a meal and talk about old times? Not right now, obviously, I’m about to fall over, but maybe tomorrow?”
Serenity shook his head. “I’d like to, but my time here’s going to be tied up in the portal and maybe some dungeons. The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can head back to Rissa.” It was worth bringing Rissa up as a way to discourage Morwen if she was thinking about trying to restart their relationship.
Morwen tilted her head to the side. “There are dungeons near here?”
Serenity pulled up his map without thinking about it much. “Closest recorded one’s about an hour away, but there are several possible locations quite a bit closer; I want to check them out as long as I’m in the area.”
Morwen nodded. “Makes sense. I’d be happy to do a run with your group if you need another mage.”
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It was hours later the next time Serenity was disturbed.
He’d managed to tease out that there were two sets of destination coordinates and a mana loop that went nowhere then came back from nowhere. The mana loop seemed to be the actual source of the pulse running through the spellform that then leaked as low-frequency noise; Serenity suspected the part where it vanished was how it was transmitting magically, but it was frustrating that he couldn’t actually see that section.
The person who disturbed him this time was Dr. Mattingly herself. “Last night sounds like it was a success.”
“Mostly,” Serenity agreed. “The destination coding is annoying; I’d almost have to build a portal myself to pin down which piece is which and how it affects the low-frequency signal.”
Dr. Mattingly smiled. “I was talking about the high-frequency signal, but are you telling me that you might be able to decode the low-frequency signal into a location? What support do you need for that?”