With all the effort required to set up the more open exploration of A’Atla’s powerplant, it was several days after Serenity’s own exploration was complete before he could really break away and check on how the task he was really interested in was coming along.

It wasn’t done. Serenity was fairly confident he’d know when the draining effect on A’Atla’s nexus was resolved; it ought to link up with the rest of Earth’s ley line network then and let him talk to Gaia.

Other people might notice, too; Serenity had no idea what the secondary effects would be. Normal ley line movement wasn’t all that spectacular, perhaps a few clear-sky lightning strikes as one shifted, but this wasn’t normal at all. He probably ought to warn someone, but what would he say? Something might happen in the next few days? There might be lightning?

Serenity shook his head, then walked into the room he knew Amani was spending most of her time in, the one with the door to the dangerous room. She might not be here right now, but she’d be back shortly if she was gone.

The room was littered with tools. Some of them he vaguely recognized from the Vault but there was also an entire set that he was fairly confident came from one of the rooms he’d seen in the powerplant; they had a memorable blue enamel on the handles.

There was a bed to the left. It was really more of a pallet than a bed, with a cushioning surface, some sheets, and a sleeping bag on top. Serenity hadn’t realized Amani was sleeping here; she had a bed up at the inner camp, why wasn’t she sleeping there? That was where the food was, anyway.

A mess to the right sort of answered that question; there was a pile of used paper plates covered in crumbs along with wrappers that looked like the ones the “meal bars” he’d seen and not tried came in. There was a stack of more meal bars, packaged snacks, and some bottled water next to the mess, sitting on a stack of more paper plates. Amani was eating down here, too.

That explained why he hadn’t seen her in several days. Serenity had assumed he was simply missing her; what could be keeping her down here?

The rest of the room was just as much of a mess, but it was a mess that spoke of construction and experiments instead of living. Broken stone shards from experiments that Serenity didn’t remember had been swept into one corner, while a table pushed against a wall held a series of smashed spheres. Serenity walked over to them and examined them more closely. They looked like they were all variations on the design Amani and he had come up with to create a barrier, but some of them were very different.

Was this why it wasn’t done already? Serenity had half expected A’Atla to finish a couple days earlier, but he’d taken the quick reply from Amani that it would be several more days at face value at that point; he’d been in the middle of coping with way too many people who all wanted something specific about the secondary interior camp being set up inside A’Atla’s powerplant to spend more time on something that was already dealt with than he had to.

Serenity walked over towards the no-longer-visible door and examined the pattern covering it. It wasn’t quite the same as what he’d expected, but he couldn’t quite pin down the difference since he wasn’t certain which layer it was on. He pulled up the schematics from his memory with Aide’s help and started to compare them to what he saw and what A’Atla’s system said was the design.

He was well into the comparison when a voice interrupted him. “Serenity? I wasn’t expecting you here for a couple days.”

Serenity turned around and saw Amani standing in the entrance. “I escaped,” he admitted, probably more truthfully than he should have. “They didn’t really need me anymore, and I’d rather wait here than try to mediate between people who both want to set up in the same spot.”

Serenity shuddered. That was actually the last thing he’d dealt with before he decided he wasn’t needed anymore. The door was open, despite the complaints from several quarters (he wasn’t surprised by the archaeologists’ unhappiness but why was a materials scientist yelling at him about disturbing the microstructure?). The camp was mostly established, even if it was very spread out; that was fairly similar to the other camp, as well. There simply wasn’t enough room for a small consolidated camp.

There were definitely no more basilisks (at least, not after the one that had somehow been hiding in A’Atla’s ventilation; they’d sent in wire-guided minibots to check since A’Atla’s stone did bad things to wireless signals). If there was another one hiding somewhere, he couldn’t help with it anyway; they’d have to cope. He could help Blaze heal anyone injured, but there was time on that requirement if needed.

No, they didn’t need him anymore. Worse, if he didn’t get out of there, they’d probably start asking him for more protective wraps or try to make him decide what to look into or something. He had his own projects; he didn’t need to be mediating between people he didn’t know about things he didn’t care about. There were other people who could do that, other people who were supposed to do that who were being ignored because he was there.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The tunnels weren’t an open secret anymore; instead, it was now fairly well known that there were several entrances into old underground areas. Serenity had seen the news reports; they still talked about “limited spaces” and “unknown cave systems” but that wouldn’t last forever. What it meant right now was that everyone wanted in on the exploration of the “major underground complex.” Serenity didn’t want to play gatekeeper, however much some people seemed to want him to do so.

“It’ll be another couple of days,” Amani said. She took a couple steps forward, then paused. She looked worried, if Serenity was reading her face correctly. He probably wasn’t.

“You’ve noticed, haven’t you? I had to change the pattern. The tests-” Amani shook her head. “It started when one of the middle layers came apart earlier than I expected. There was no lateral strength, so each layer would dissolve when the pressure finally got high enough. It took me a lot to come up with the right model …”

It took Amani several hours to explain her findings and what she’d done to fix each issue. Serenity listened as she went through it; she’d ended up with a far larger design that would take A’Atla longer to build, because she was building around the remains of her previous iterations, but it seemed like it would probably work. Of course, he’d thought that about the previous design, too.

Serenity never did get around to asking why she’d worked on it day and night, barely even emerging for supplies, yet never mentioned it to him or asked for help. He simply forgot the question when she showered him with what she’d figured out in the time he’d spent dealing with other things.

It was actually another four days before A’Atla would reach the point where the plug would either prove itself or not. Serenity spent a good bit of the time with Amani, going over her experiments and conclusions, but he also spent a lot of the time with Rissa and Jenna; he had the time. It was better to spend time with his family when he could.

He made certain to have dinner with his mother each night, as well; his father even showed up for three of the four meals. It was the last three; Serenity had the feeling Bethany had some words to say to Lex when he missed the first dinner. Neither of them mentioned it, but Serenity appreciated the effort to spend time together.

Lex had some interesting tidbits, as well; he was deeply involved in the excavation of a spot that must have once had an eddy or something, since the area was full mostly of bits and pieces from A’Atla, held together by a relatively small amount of mud. Almost half of what they found had tracings that indicated it had once been enchanted. Even though very little of the magic had survived, the broken bits were very interesting to essentially everyone except Serenity.

Two people from Katya’s family would be coming to examine everyone once the process went through, a cousin and one of her sisters. Bethany couldn’t say when it would happen, but she could say that she was trying to hurry the process. Having experienced enchanters with some local loyalty would only help the US position, as far as she was concerned. She didn’t admit out loud that their loyalty was more to Serenity and by extension his family than to the country, but Serenity wondered if that was the true reason it was taking so long.

Serenity did warn his parents about the possible consequences in a few days, but without specifics for either the effects or the timing it was difficult to prepare. Even so, they didn’t ignore the warning; they did the best they could. They couldn’t evacuate; it wouldn’t be possible quickly and without better information than “something might happen during this couple of days” no one was going to believe an evacuation order anyway.

Moving everyone they could underground was possible and seemed almost as good; A’Atla was extremely sturdy, after all. The equipment mostly couldn’t be stored underground and it made the crowding worse, but Bethany commented that it was surprisingly easy to convince people that a roof over their heads was better than the canvas that was all they’d had when the roof came with A’Atla’s interior climate control.

Lex took a different approach; he started working with the security forces’ commanders to create plans for a wide variety of scenarios. Oddly enough, they included things like “A’Atla is starting to submerge again” and “weird magic stuff starts happening on the magic island-ship, what do we do?” Some of the contingency plans were hilarious but others made a lot of sense. Lex wanted to schedule an exercise to more or less coincide with the days Serenity thought the construction of the plug might finish, so he did.

Lex told Serenity all about the complaints that they hadn’t had enough time to plan for disaster at dinner the next evening. “...I agree with them, too; they haven’t had enough time to plan. You never have enough time.”

“”We can pause A’Atla’s build process so you’ll have more time for planning,” Serenity offered. “I’ll have to do it tonight so it’s between layers but we can do that.” Amani had even tested what pausing would do to the strength of the resulting material. Serenity didn’t know why she’d tested that, but he was grateful now that she’d thought of it. A pause could add weakness if it was during a layer, but A’Atla couldn’t build continuously forever. The default structure included layering, and while the bonding between layers was weaker than a continuous extrusion, it was still stronger than a paused extrusion.

Serenity’s father chuckled and shook his head with a wide grin on his face. “Don’t. We’re ready enough; a few days won’t matter at this point. Weeks might but you shouldn’t wait that long.”

Serenity nodded at that. He didn’t want to wait and see what else the Night Fire god, Apollyon or Cronus or whatever his name might be, had up his sleeve.