An alarm rang, nothing more than a simple timer, but one made not with wheels and cogs, rather with magic. It wasn't much, but it was something that most people of this would would never own, never be able to see with their own eyes. Well, probably, I could hope we'd see more mages, but in my lifetime, I doubted we'd have enough for them to be commonplace.

I looked up from my work with a slight frown. It'd been another day, and I still ran into the same problem. I'd spent years in this world and come to love it, but now there was a clear threat. The portals we'd been using were a mess, a mistake that could so easily backfire, explosively. I'd also been present for something nearly ripping its way into this reality, something that sent a shiver down my spine. That had to be stopped.

Unfortunately, that was far easier said then done. My research of late had been attempts to stop the portals, or at the very least to alleviate the mess they could leave on the world around them if things went wrong. The emperor wouldn't stop using them, not with how useful they were, but he was at least looking at spreading them out a bit, so that was... something.

Sadly the magical items in this world had limits to their abilities. The creator of that little system hadn't added everything I might want for the portals, particularly some way to smooth space back to where it should be. I didn't know if he'd left that out, or if he'd not realized it was important, and though I knew where he was, I couldn't get there. That fact was quite frustrating, it was impossible, or neigh impossible, to go and drag the old man out of his cave and make him find a way to fix this.

I could fix them manually with my own spells, but there was no insert function into the cores that would allow me to automate that. There was however a few tricks I could use to address some of my problems.

The little box I'd been putting together recently glowed faintly, the compass-like arrow pointing off to the north. After trying, and failing, to find a way to smooth out space, I'd gone for a different approach. If I couldn't fix things automatically, I could at least automate the process of finding the problems. This box was my solution.

Inside were a number of small pseudo-gates. They looked, and in some ways acted like their larger cousins, except that they never actually opened passages to each other. Instead, each one would attempt to form connections with the others, going through a sequence of lessening the allowable disturbance in the local space until they started failing. Once they did it was just a simple comparison to see which ones failed first and triangulate for a direction of the nearest spatial anomaly.

I'd gotten the idea from out own travel system. Our gates would fail to activate properly if there was too much turbulence, and having been stuck in a small town for so long that fact had stuck with me. It wasn't how that feature was supposed to be used, but it worked.

There were failings of course, the box only found the nearest disturbance, and because it couldn't tell me how big it was it gave no indication of how far it would be. It was still a massive step forward, and one I was keeping to myself for now. It wasn't fully done, and there were still lots of kinks to work out of the system. It currently just pointed towards the nearest gate in our own network, a recent addition just near the city's southern gate.

I locked the box down with the inbuilt password, didn't want anyone else using it, and headed out into my main 'official' lab. There wasn't anything too important in here, just a few tools and some minor items I made for myself or my family, before heading up into the house proper.

I nearly face-planted into the maid whose hand was reaching for the door as I walked into the main house.

"Oh, Miss Alana, I was just coming to tell you that dinner will be ready at your leisure," she said, slightly nervous; she was new, they all were.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

I had a staff of five, but with how little undifferentiated labor cost in this world, and how much a magic user like myself could make, it was hardly a drop in my income to pay them all well. If anything I'd need to add more in the future, just for the household upkeep.

"Wonderful, what are we having tonight?" Technically I approved all the menus, but honestly I never paid much attention to them.

"I've been told that the cook has made a vegetable soup to start with. The main course is roasted beef fillet with herbs, asparagus with a cream sauce, and a medley of root vegetables. For desert there are assorted fruits, lightly treated with sugar." Her words nearly stopped me.

"That's... lovely actually, thank you." It occurred to me that I'd really come up from the little hut I'd been born into. "Is there anything else?"

"A bit of mail miss. Several invitations and letters both from Mister Ulanion and your mother, the latter of which was marked as important," she said as she followed me up towards my bedroom.

"Invitations? Oh, goodness it's nearing winter isn't it?" I said as I realized that people were wanting me to attend parties and the like.

"It is indeed miss, though I'm told they're nowhere near as formal as they used to be. I know how you hate those things."

I laughed as we entered my room. "I went to a few before the nobility ceased to be, did you know that? Nothing could have been more formal."

The maid helped me change into something lighter than my working clothes for dinner. I didn't need the help, but it did make things easier, and they got all worried you were going to fire them if you didn't let your staff do lots of little things like this for you. It was weird, but also just how things were. Though honestly it was sometimes all way too much, and I just wanted to go travel some days.

"I didn't miss, were they nice?" She asked, making small talk.

"Very stuffy, and not my crowd. I did the illusions for some of them, glad that tradition got dropped. Though I suppose they were really pretty set pieces."

Dinner was a bit much, but overall the food was excellent. I'd found a cook who was on the older side, and he seemed to think that I needed to eat far fancier things than I was used to. Though after some prodding he'd stopped making multiple courses for anything except dinner.

Afterwards I laid into the letters, starting with the one I wanted the most. Ulanion sent me one daily if he couldn't come see me, and filled them with things like sketches, descriptions of his thoughts, and poetry, either in my language or his native tongue. It was old-school romantic and I sort of loved it.

Frowning I popped the seal on my mother's missive next. She went through her standard list of greetings, before directing me to the included instructions on which social events I should attend, and which to just throw the invitations away from. I'd had to direct her multiple times to remember that I no longer lived under her rule, but she still wanted me to go to some things. She did make it clear that there was one event I couldn't avoid though, if only because the monarch was putting it on.

That invitation had been put on the top of the pile, ostensibly by one of my staff. Emperor Durin and his wife were having a gathering this year at the former royal palace. It was mostly used for state functions now, but the night in question was the winter solstice, mercifully a few months from now. Seemed that this year there would be an eclipse that very night, and they were getting people together to enjoy the spectacle.

With a sigh I moved to the desk in my room. Even if there was a formula to it, writing out tons of responses was still a chore. The only one that took me any significant time to write was my response to my suitor, but that didn't bother me in the least.