Before they removed the spell protecting the portal, Serenity took some pictures of the room and had several other people take pictures as well. He then showed them to the people on his team who couldn’t see that part of the room.
They were easily able to see the diagram on the floor in the pictures he and Rissa had taken, but the pictures everyone else took were missing the portion of the room that held the diagram. Knowing that, Serenity asked if there were any security cameras in the basement.
There were, and anyone could see the images on the camera.
It was definitely useful to know that the Mind-based avoidance magic didn’t work on unintelligent electronics. Serenity suspected it might work on AIs such as Aide, but there wasn’t a good way to test that; Aide was seeing things only through Serenity’s senses and other recordings, so there was no chance he’d be affected.
Clearing up the ritual on the floor enough that other people could see it would be as simple as cleaning the floor - even if it did have to be done by someone who could see the ritual instead of avoiding it. Another alternative was to use something that would clean the entire floor without human intervention.
Lt. Colonel Westbrook asked them to leave it in place; if he needed it cleaned up, he could get his hands on a robomop. For now, he was going to “let the boffins play with it”.
Serenity had to look up what a boffin was.
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“So, where are we headed next?” Serenity glanced over at Mr. Williams. “Did you want us to check out the other portals, or should we plan on heading home soon?”
“No one expected you to destroy that portal so quickly,” Mr. Williams admitted. “We obviously can’t tell you what to do, but if you’d be willing to stay and look at the other portals, we’d be happy to have you.” Mr. Williams kept his eyes on the road as he talked. It wasn’t far to the hotel, but there was traffic now that they were back outside the evacuation zone.
Serenity shrugged. It’d be a waste of time to fly all the way here just to close a single portal unless there was a significant reason to get back home. He had about another two weeks before the Sterath would be ready to assault the Denver portal, at the last estimate. He wasn’t entirely certain he’d be needed for that, either; even though he’d killed three of their highest-Tier people and many of the lower Tiers, the Sterath were still extremely numerous; he rather expected that the only reason he’d end up helping that assault was if there turned out to be another Tier Five. He didn’t remember one from the Denver assault in the other timeline, but that could simply mean he hadn’t run into it.
Anything short of a Tier Five could be handled in a relatively conventional manner. Even a Tier Five could be handled; he’d spent quite a bit of time with his father working out possible approaches. He wouldn’t be called in unless those approaches didn’t work.
“We can stay for a while. The more portals we close, the better.” Serenity hoped that having fewer portals open would help free up resources to help other places, but even he knew enough about the world to know that responses would be patchwork at best. Still, whatever help was given was still help, and he could also try to head to the worse-off places eventually. If they’d let him.
Mr. Williams nodded. “There are two other portals that we’d like you to look at; one is near Manchester, while the other is on one of the islands in Orkney.”
Serenity frowned. “I thought the Prime Minister mentioned three more?”
“There was one in an abandoned mall in Birmingham. Once we located it, we sent a team in and they destroyed it. They didn’t find any sign of what came through it; we’ll have to deal with whatever it was when it turns up, but at least the portal’s closed.” Mr. Williams didn’t seem concerned. “They did check after the soldiers reported it closed and the portal detector found no remaining sign of a portal.”
The lack of concern was probably reasonable; not defending your exit meant you weren’t planning to leave and you didn’t expect reinforcements. They probably could have left it open, but Serenity could understand not wanting a potential invasion point from an unknown location with unknown risks in the middle of a city. “What do we know about the other two?”
Mr. Williams shrugged. “Not much. The soldiers we sent towards the one in Manchester reported running into dirt barricades, so we pulled them back. We’re trying to figure out what it might be. The Orkney one is in a relatively inaccessible location on a mountainside; we believe it’s in a cave, but even getting up there will be difficult. It’s the most recently located of the three; the Birmingham one was first.”
“Any idea what came through either portal? Even just a rumor could work; we found the Sterath partly because of ridiculous reports of kangaroos on the streets.” Serenity knew that people back home were looking for that sort of thing, but he didn’t know if the news had spread.
Mr. Williams shook his head. “I haven’t heard anything, but I’ll pass the question along.”
Serenity looked up at the sky through the windshield. Despite all the time they’d spent at the portal site, it had really been pretty quick; it wasn’t even 11AM yet. “How far is it?”
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“From here? Probably four or five hours, depending on traffic. It’ll take some time to arrange everything.” Mr. Williams frowned. “We were assuming you wouldn’t finish before next week, even if this was fast; I’ll have to see if I can get everything moved forward. While I’m doing that, is there anything you’d like to see while you’re in London?”
Serenity had a list, and he was certain Rissa did too. It’d been years since he was in London, and he wasn’t certain Rissa had ever visited. Still, there was one other thing he’d promised to take care of when he could. “Do you have any nearby dungeons? I really should visit as many as I can.”
“You mean the new combat areas?” Mr. Williams looked concerned. “There are four in London and several in the surrounding area. It’ll probably be hard to get in, though; they’re generally booked solid.”
Serenity nodded. “I’m not surprised. It’s a weekday, so I thought there might be a chance. I’d like to visit them even if we can’t, though, but if we can’t get a combat slot, it should probably be after they’re all full for the day so we don’t risk taking one we shouldn’t.”
After all, did it really make sense that Gaia’s emissary should have to fight his way down the dungeon? It wasn’t a problem for him in these Tier Zero and Tier One one or two-level dungeons, but at higher tiers it would quickly become ridiculous. It was worth the experiment to see if there was another option.
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Most of the group stayed at the hotel while Serenity and Rissa went out to explore. Ita wanted to watch TV; Raz jumped at the chance and asked if he could join her. Naturally, they immediately started squabbling over what they should watch.
Katya, on the other hand, declared that if they were going to be traveling the following day, she didn’t want to travel more today. She’d take the time to meditate and practice.
The map of London dungeons was completely shocking. Three of them were almost next to each other, and the fourth was only a little ways away. There was no way this was a normal dungeon arrangement; Serenity was no dungeon expert, but what he’d heard was that dungeons too close to each other would kill each other. Serenity knocked on the door to the room Raz and Ita were using to watch movies.
He heard them pause the movie before Raz answered the door. “Serenity? Weren’t you going to go look at dungeons?”
“I need you to take a look at this.” Serenity shooed Raz inside, closed the door, then held up the tablet he was using to project the map with dungeon locations on it.
It took Raz a moment to realize what he was looking at. “They’re that close together? That’s not possible. They won’t even form that close together.”
“Why not? I’ve heard that dungeons that are too close together will kill each other, is that what you mean?” Serenity set the tablet down on a table and leaned back against a wall. He hoped that was a myth; dungeons fighting in the middle of London sounded like a very bad thing.
Raz shook his head. “That’s only in the wilderness, when they aren’t cleared out. Overflows can invade other dungeons and take them over or kill them. The problem is that these four are all too close together. A standard dungeon forms at a nexus point, and even if there’s another nearby nexus point on the same line, another dungeon won’t form. No one knows why. Sometimes you can get two sort of close dungeons when there are four ley lines running through an area, but these are awfully close and there are too many. What are the odds of there being eight ley lines with unique intersections in an area this small? It just doesn’t happen.”
Serenity thought back to the ley line mapping he did in New York City. “How small can the ley line be?”
Raz shrugged. “I don’t know how to measure a ley line. I can’t even see them.”
“We should work on that.” Serenity’s mouth was on autopilot, but his brain was running quickly. “I bet the size of the ley line impacts how large the dungeon can be, so these will likely always be small. But I also bet you’re right, that there are simply far too many ley lines in London. There were too many in New York City; I never found out why.”
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Serenity and Rissa quickly planned out a route that would let them visit all of the dungeons that day. They were fairly confident they wouldn’t be able to get into all of them; the two that could be scheduled online were fully booked for the rest of the day. Most of them even stated their normal entrance times, and they tended to be in the morning.
The first dungeon on the list was called the Echoes of Big Ben.
There was a lot of information about it available online; Serenity had Aide pull it together, so that he and Rissa had everything they might need. Unlike most dungeons, it appeared to have built its single “floor” mostly vertically; each room had a stairway winding around it to reach the next room. It was four rooms tall, followed by a fifth “boss room” that included an open-faced clock with a short ledge outside the main part of the boss room.
The enemies were all clockwork creatures, usually with an actual clock for a “face”. Some of the pictures were incredibly cute; there was even a short video of a fight with a clockwork tiger that included the moment when it stopped to roar to mark the hour, despite the fight. Most of the clockwork creations, however, seemed to be imitating people; they weren’t always the same people, but at least two of the rooms always held a scene from Big Ben’s past, turned into clockwork.
The boss was a miniature animated version of the clock tower, clock and all. It was a fairly complex fight, with the boss moving into several different phases with different abilities; each phase change was announced by the animated clock tower scurrying onto the outer ledge and sitting there for about thirty seconds.
It had been discovered that shoving the boss off the ledge when it ran outside worked, but unsuccessfully shoving it off the ledge triggered it to gain all of the abilities of all of its phases at the same time. Only one of the groups that did that managed to win the fight, and it was only barely. They were lucky and got a good reward (even if they wouldn’t say what it was), but after that people realized why there were a number of groups that still hadn’t emerged: they’d likely lost to the boss after failing to push it off the edge.
Losing in the Echoes of Big Ben was also strange. It was considered one of the safest dungeons in London, because if you lost, no matter what condition you were in, you would appear at the entrance to the dungeon some time later. If you lost in the first room, it would be a couple of hours after your loss, while the later rooms took longer. So far, the only people who didn’t reappear within a day were the groups who lost to the enraged final boss; they took a week.
There were no slots available; the next available slot was the following week.