The Celmothians who had been abducted to Yew-Kay and had taken a trip back through my world now had classes. Most of them ended up as artificers, which put them in Khithae’s area of expertise. Regardless of class, however, I now had some better experience training others. My experience with the Portal Squad had empowered me with tips and tricks beneficial to people of all classes.
And of course fighting gave pretty much everyone experience, and experience led to levels which was always good. So I convinced as many people as possible to spar with as many others as possible. Preferably at least with me.
Celmothian weaponry was fine, but they focused too much on energy weapons. Then again, I couldn’t imagine a small feline carrying around the ammunition for a proper kinetic weapon. They did have some tricks up their sleeves involving randomizing the wavelengths of their lasers, but the more I got used to fighting against such weapons the better I was at efficiently covering a wider range.
They did have an easier time targeting me when I was normal sized, but when I was Reduced they were still pretty accurate. That said, it seemed they didn’t engage in much person-to-person combat. And why would they, when they had ships?
I had to admit I wasn’t confident I could take any significant amount of fire from any sort of ship, regardless of familiarity with their particular flavor of lasers. Maybe that was something classes couldn’t keep up with… or maybe I just wasn’t strong enough. The old beastmaster Lyklor had a frankly ridiculous number of advancements in some of his abilities. If I got to something like twenty total advancements I could more or less absorb a meteor swarm, if my calculations were correct. However, that was something like 60 more points without natural upgrades. In short, I’d have to triple my investment.
Then again, that wouldn’t be so bad. At that point it would be just slightly more than my investment in Gate. Each level gave me a number of points equivalent to that level, though it also took more experience. Those increased more or less linearly so with increased experience gain at higher levels… the number of points I got per time should also increase. That information wasn’t exactly new, I just hadn’t looked at things from quite that angle.
Of course, that assumed I was always challenging myself at least a little bit. Experience could actually drop off to nothing if my battles were all trivial. But considering what I had seen, I wasn’t worried about running out of danger anytime soon.
People who didn’t have to fight for experience might find it easier in some ways, though the possibility of their daily tasks becoming trivial was certainly higher. I would say there was only so much one could wrestle with books, but there didn’t really seem to be a limit on knowledge. Earth’s sciences went far more in depth on some topics, though presumably my old world had quite a bit of information from a magical perspective. I just hadn’t gotten access to as much as I would have liked.
Ultimately, everything came down to how much a person could do- and except for Aspect of the Sage people were probably most limited by mana since it required doing things. And maybe mana was still important for them since they could Enhance their mind. If they were a mage, at least.
-----
“I feel like there should have been an attack by now,” I commented. “Usually some sort of chaos or danger pops up.”
“Dude!” Great Girl glared at me. “Don’t say things like that. It’s like you’re asking for trouble.”
I just looked at her. Then over at Midnight. He rolled his eyes. “You say that like he isn’t.”
“Oh. Right.” She frowned, “I guess in that case, it might not invite trouble?”
I suddenly had a brilliant thought. “Do you think there’s a spell for that?”
Great Girl tilted her head. “For like, what? Inviting trouble?”
“Obviously.”
“That’s not really a thing people tend to want,” she pointed out. “All the spells are for like, avoiding it. Like Augury. Do you guys have that one or is it Cleric only?”
“Unfortunately, knowing the future in such a way relies on the gods,” I said.
“You sure?” Great Girl asked. “Because Spot is here and he’s a cleric.”
I looked around. “He is?”
“I mean, this dimension. Not like, here here. Probably. But like- no offense- if your world’s gods do exist, do they even exist in this universe?”
“... A good question,” I admitted. “Though I believe Spot has likely gone down the route of following an idea.”
“That works?” Great Girl shook her head. “That’s so laaame. If you have divine magic, it should come from gods! End of story. I could imagine a setting where it makes sense, but both together…” she shook her head.
“I don’t even know if my old world actually has deities to begin with,” I pointed out. “They might just be sets of ideals.”
Izzy had a comment there. “I would say I believed in them, until coming to… this world?” She tilted her head. “Universe. Dimension. Whatever. If they do exist, I have no idea what they’re doing. I feel like they should probably stop random instructions from different dimensions.”
“... why?” I frowned.
“Because that’s… bad?” she sighed. “Or maybe they’re all just in a deadlock because people have conflicting opinions on what should be done.”
“It would be fine if all of us who want random portals just went to a different dimension,” I said. “Couldn’t they arrange for that? Though maybe they want to stop the demons from popping into other worlds because they’d kinda be among that set.”
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Great Girl grimaced. “Does your version of things have infinite layers of the abyss?”
“Well, it’s not like anyone’s counted,” I said. “We know there’s a lot of abyss.”
“I have relevant questions,” Khithae said. She didn’t tend to include herself in these sorts of conversations much, but this one apparently caught her attention. “These… demons. They are able to leave the abyss?”
“Well, yes. But it’s difficult.”
“Certainly,” Khithae said. “But say there is some probability of one successfully reaching your… material plane. If there are an infinite number of them, then no matter how low the probability of success, and no matter how small the proportion of them specifically interested in reaching the material plane, there should be an infinite number of them arriving at any moment. But that isn’t the case, so clearly it can’t be infinite.”
“Ooh, that’s an excellent proof of bounded planar theory,” I said. “I certainly don’t see any immediate holes. Then again, I don’t have access to the libraries that would have discussed that possibility. We might have missed something.”
-----
The day continued on and we did not get attacked by aliens or demons. However, there was a disaster the following day. And it wasn’t my fault, because we were talking about a whole planet. No matter how good their building regulations and city management, somewhere across the planet some sort of weather phenomenon or earthquake had to cause some sort of damage at some point.
In this case, it was an earthquake that also caused fires. It wasn’t even in our city, but Celmoth was a unified planet so the news picked up all jurisdictions more or less equally. We just happened to see the news displayed on a screen we were passing. Great Girl stopped. “Where is that?” she asked Midnight.
“That’s uh…” it took Midnight a moment- clearly he didn’t know the name of the prefecture off the top of his head. “Halfway around the world. Or all the way? It’s almost exactly the far side.”
“Oh,” Great Girl sighed. “I was thinking we could go help, but…”
Here was my chance to use Teleport. Just as I was about to suggest that, Midnight spoke. “We have teleportation stations.” Dammit. “But I think teleporting into a disaster zone is restricted.” Yes! “Though we can probably get an exception.”
How could my friend do this to me? How cruel.
“How long would it take to get permission?” I asked.
“... A few minutes?” he conjectured.
“Then we should-” I caught myself. “Then we should hurry. Try to begin that process.” I turned to Khithae, Izzy, and Jerome. “I don’t know if you guys are equipped to handle a disaster situation, I would suggest most of you stay here.”
“I can magically repair things,” Khithae said. “Or strengthen them to prevent a collapse.”
“I can cast Energy Ward for the fire?” Jerome said.
Izzy paused for a moment. “I’m sure I could help somehow. I don’t have to run into a burning building or anything.”
As for why I didn’t try to suggest magical teleportation as we ran towards the nearest station, it was because we’d still not tested how far we could go. Half a planet was probably too far.
A couple minutes later we were gathered in a teleportation chamber, waiting for our permission to come through. “If we were a traditional rescue team,” Midnight said. “We’d be pre-cleared. Speaking of which, we need to listen to the people already there who know what they’re doing.”
“I’m trained for search and rescue,” Great Girl pointed out. “I know how to listen to instructions for what to pick up.”
“Great, so-” Midnight started. “We’re cleared!”
Even as he said that, as the teleportation chamber was already sealed, there was a brief moment of weirdness… and then we were somewhere else. I didn’t even feel any power, but then again Celmothians didn’t use magic or super tech. Their stuff just worked.
A few minutes later, Great Girl was maxing out her size- with a boost from Enlarge- and helping the surrounding telekinetic rigs pick up and stabilize large chunks of building. Those rigs then piled the rubble away from the disaster zone.
I knew that Celmothians didn’t have one particular thing, so I talked to someone in charge. “Would it be bad to have some areas suddenly be colder?”
“Terrible!” the tabby patterned coordinator declared. “Heat stress would cause more damage.”
“So no Blizzard.” Obviously I was planning to lower the power. Didn’t need to freeze anyone in there. “I can make people way faster for a minute. Or like Jerome offered, fire resistant. Oh, or I can make them fly.”
“How does that-”
“It all just works,” Midnight said.
“Smoke resistant?”
I shook my head. “Afraid not. Oh, if I can get to anyone stuck I can… unstick them.”
“How?”
“Mag-”
“Right I got it.”
Rob had been helping briefly, but he’d gone through his 20 or so mana pretty quickly and now just had a red ring indicating low power. Though I was pretty sure his actual energy was still pretty much full?
Ultimately most of my mana went to helping Great Girl. Both Enlarge and Enhance lasted for a while, and even by the time we arrived we were mostly past the ‘pull people out of a burning building’ stage of things.
Frankly, Celmoth didn’t even need us. The main thing we provided was a somewhat more flexible form of rubble clearance. There weren’t so many people helping that we got in the way, though. Well, if we’d physically been dealing with anything we might have since most of us were way bigger than Celmothians. That included Izzy, though having human hands was quite useful and she had more strength than common Celmothian grasping suits so she did manage to carry a few locals out of precarious positions.
Helping people was good. Though frankly, I wasn’t made for disaster relief. I’d rather be more of a disaster… preventer. A disaster puncher?
I’d prefer to be fighting villains. Because none of this gave experience. Well, even if I didn’t get a level using my spells was still valuable training… but if I was helping people I’d prefer maximum efficiency.
Eventually our mana was exhausted and Great Girl seemed about exhausted enough to transform into five-foot-tall Sophia, so we took a rest. It seemed that we’d already freed any trapped civilians- the Celmothians had cool scanning things that could find people under rubble- and once there were no people in the area they could suck the oxygen out of the area and stop the fires. So the rest was just going to be boring old cleanup and rebuilding, which was far less urgent.
I figured we should get some of the stuff they had here on Earth. Though I could already see how some of this technology would be dangerous in the wrong hands, so Extra might not go for it. That was for them to work out with the Celmothians long term, though.