Bob watched as Talima emerged from the bathroom, dressed in slacks and a blouse. Her skin, which had been pale and washed out with dark lines tracking the wrinkles in the skin, was now a consistent caramel color, healthy and unlined.
She looked forty years younger.
"I'm going to open a portal in the bathroom," Bob said, "as I don't believe there are any cameras in there. You will all need to precede me as when I pass through the portal, my air effect will end."
"To be clear, we are ending up back home tonight, right?" Dave asked.
"Sure," Bob replied, "I just need to top off my mana, you can enjoy the view for a few minutes, and then I'll bring us back over."
Bob watched as looks were exchanged all around, with Talima appearing somewhat confused.
"It'll take me a hundred seconds, so bear with me," Bob walked into the bathroom, grateful for the extra size they gave the room to accommodate patients with disabilities.
He pulled another one hundred mana crystal pouch from his inventory and began to pull mana from the crystals. As the last crystal dissipated, he heard a hiss of indrawn breath from the doorway.
Bob turned away from the blue-black portal and gestured for Jack to head through as he was waiting in the doorway.
Jack flashed him a smile before striding confidently through the portal.
One by one, his gaming group entered the portal until finally, Tony escorted a wary Talima to the event horizon.
"This is safe?" She asked Bob uncertainly.
"Absolutely," Bob replied, "I'll be right behind you."
Hesitantly she stepped through with Tony. Bob closed the bathroom door and stepped through his portal.
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Dave forced himself to step away from the portal to avoid causing a traffic jam, stepping forward and to the side to link his arm through Amanda's.
"That looks like a glacier," she commented, her eyes locked on the sheet of ice that towered above the valley they'd found themselves in.
"It does," Dave agreed as he swept his gaze across the valley, pausing as he spotted the stone building behind them.
"Two moons," they heard Jack say from where he'd sat down ahead of them. He'd leaned back and was looking up at the sky.
Looking up as well, Dave could see that there were indeed two moons, although one seemed much smaller than the other. He didn't see any recognizable constellations, and the stars above seemed to be both brighter and denser.
"Babe, I'm kind of tripping out right now," he murmured to Amanda.
She squeezed his hand and leaned against him. "We're on another planet, in an alternate universe, "she whispered, "I'm kind of tripping out too."
"Welcome to Glacier Valley," Bob's voice boomed from behind them as he gestured towards the stone building that was the only indication that the valley had ever known humanity.
"Would you like to see the Adventurer's Guild?" he asked with a grin that seemed much less awkward.
"I'd like to get in out of the cold," Talima said, rubbing her arms.
"It is a bit chilly," Amanda agreed.
Bob nodded and gestured for them to follow him as he opened another portal and walked through it.
Dave walked through the portal behind Tony and Tamila and was greeted with what looked for all the world like a tavern from a classic D&D campaign, except it was empty save for Bob and his cat.
He sat down at the table Bob had claimed and looked at the man.
"So, no active particles on Earth means no mana regeneration?" Dave asked.
Bob nodded, "It doesn't take long to top up the tank back here, though."
"Well, we're here," Dave said, "are we part of this system now?"
"Mentally concentrate on the word 'Status,'" Bob advised with a wide grin as he dug his fingers into his cat's mane.
'Status,' Dave thought, then gaped as what looked like a holographic screen appeared in his vision.
Name Dave Armwell Level 0 Tier 5 Size 5 Armor Hardness 10 Weapon hardness 10 Str 5 Armor Style 1.01 Weapon type 1.1 Cord 5 Dodge 0 Spell casting 1 End 5 Int 5 Wis 5 Beauty 5 Health 25 Mana 5 Armor 12 Mana Regen 1 Damage 16 Spell Casting 15
Stolen story; please report.
"Damn," he muttered, glancing over to see Amanda's face slack-jawed in amazement.
Looking at the rest of the group, he could tell they were all seeing the same thing.
"Looks like we're noobs," Dave grinned as he looked over his status window.
"Bob, what level are you?" He asked curiously.
"I'm over the tier cap," Bob responded cautiously.
"Tier cap?" Amanda's voice echoed his own. Dave leaned over and kissed her cheek.
"Your maximum level is determined by your tier²," Bob explained, "so your tier cap is twenty-five. Once you reach your tier cap, in order to advance further, you have to apotheosis to a higher tier."
"Which you've done," Dave noted.
Bob looked pained as he replied, "I had to, in order to have the necessary skills come back to Earth to try and save everyone."
Bob took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment before letting it out and opening them again.
Dave exchanged a glance with Amanda, confirming that she hadn't missed that behavior.
"When I got blown into this universe," Bob began, "I was basically dead on arrival. Half of my body was just gone, torn apart by the explosion. The System rebuilt my body using what was left of me as a template, which resulted in my body being flawed."
"Looks pretty good to me," Jack smiled brilliantly.
"It was mostly a metaphysical thing," Bob responded hesitantly, demonstrating that awkwardness again.
Dave caught Jack's gaze and frowned at him.
"It damaged the pathways that allow mana to flow through my body, drastically increasing the cost of my spells, and worse, preventing me from taking a path at level five," Bob raised a hand as Jack opened his mouth again. "Paths are basically classes; you get to choose one at level five, although it appears that the best ones have specific requirements as far as attribute allocation and skill choice, along with other restrictions."
"So some of the paths are better than others," Amanda reasoned, causing Dave to smile.
"I love you so much, you little twink," he muttered, squeezing her hand.
"Absolutely," Bob agreed, "in fact, the very best paths were held secret by the Noble houses."
"Were?" Dave asked.
Bob blinked and looked furtive for a moment and pulled a stack of pamphlets out of his satchel, handing them out across the table. "I sort of figured out some paths that were like the Nobles, made a bunch of pamphlets, and then arranged for them to be distributed around the Kingdom."
"Keep that under your hat if you could," Bob said, "Someone else took the credit for it so I wouldn't have to take the heat, and I'd like to keep it that way."
"Why tell us then?" Amanda queried, "you could have just told us it was someone else, and we would have never known the difference."
"Well," Bob drew out the word, "actually, you would have. I accepted a divine blessing from the god of truth, which lets me know whenever someone is lying to me, but conversely, lets someone else know if I'm lying to them."
"God of truth?" Talima asked.
"Lowercase g," Bob replied, "as near as I can determine they are tier ten or eleven beings that are sharing their power around."
"So you know if we're lying to you?" Dave was reviewing his interactions with Bob, trying to remember if he'd even told the man a white lie.
"This table," Bob laid his hand on it, "is made of diamond."
Dave recoiled slightly as he felt a sense of wrongness, and he just knew that he was being lied to.
"Yeah," he grunted, "I can see that works."
"So everything you've told us is the truth," Vera said, having reached the end of the thought process first.
"Can't lie," Bob shrugged, "not that I have anything I'd lie about, although I wouldn't mind if you kept my level secret as well; that sort of thing is considered pretty personal information, along with skills and attributes."
"Ok," Dave said as he stood up. "Clearly, we need to continue this discussion, but this tavern appears to be unstaffed, and Vera's lasagna is in the oven, so why don't we head back to my house and eat while we talk this over."
He watched as Bob placed his hand back in his satchel, counting the seconds as they passed. One hundred seconds later, a blue-black gateway twisted into being. Dave looked at it closely, noting that the edge seemed solid and unfluctuating, while the space inside was a whirling chaotic mess of roiling energy.
Shrugging, he walked arm in arm with Amanda through the portal.
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Jack walked through the portal and back into the hallway of Dave's house. He headed to the kitchen on autopilot, quickly pulling a fresh bottle of beer from the fridge and heading back into the game room, where he took his seat.
He popped the cap from his beer and leaned back.
He looked at the pamphlet in his other hand. He'd worked at a print shop as a teenager and had learned more about paper than he'd ever wanted to know. This wasn't like anything he'd ever worked with: too many imperfections, each sheet made unique by them.
Looking at the blocky characters, he admitted to himself that he'd never seen an alphabet like it.
"So," he began, "while this is a nice little pamphlet, I don't suppose you could tell us what it actually says."
Bob was sitting down, and he froze, then thumped into his chair. "Fuck, I forgot they were in Thayland," he muttered, before pulling a laptop out of what Jack was certain was a bag of holding at his side, flipped it open, and spent the next several seconds waiting, then he clicked around for a few more, then started to type.
Jack considered the man. He was stupidly handsome, although Jack had noticed that there was a beauty attribute on his character sheet and had to wonder if that was why. He didn't act at all like the beautiful people Jack had known throughout his life, and being undeniably handsome himself; he'd known quite a few.
Bob seemed almost desperate for them to believe him, and the feeling when he'd lied about the table... well, the only explanation was that he had manipulated them with some other type of magic, which didn't do anything to disprove the magic he'd already seen.
Also, he didn't appear to have any social skills. Jack knew that some people were so badly damaged that they barely functioned socially, but the ones he'd met had all shared in having an obvious reason. They were on the spectrum, or they had traumatic experiences in their past, or they were disfigured.
Bob didn't appear to be disfigured, nor was he on the spectrum, which left trauma of some sort.
Jack shook his head. Dave had told him Bob was off-limits, and while he couldn't help but flirt, he could see why.
"So, in your opinion," Jack asked as Bob lifted a canteen to his lips, "what is the best path?"
Bob frowned as he capped his canteen and dropped it back in his bag. "There isn't really a 'best' path," Bob replied, "it's more a case of 'what's the best path for what you want to do; Do you want to heal people, grow food, build structures, craft armor or weapons, teach others, protect others from monsters, vaporize monsters, or just be completely safe while slaughtering monsters in job lots whilst sipping iced tea in your easy chair?"
"That last one was oddly specific," Jack grinned.
"The Path of the Endless Swarm is arguably the safest and thus most effective Path for delving," Bob said, "minimal risk with maximum reward."
"Is that the path you took?" Jack asked.
"It's the path I would have took," Bob replied, "but I couldn't choose a path until I'd managed to fix my matrix, at which point I had concerns other than safety," he grimaced.
"I'll be happy to expound on the perfection of that path once I've typed this up," Bob nodded to his laptop as he started typing again.
Jack leaned back and pulled out his phone. There was no doubt in his mind that he was going back to that other world, grabbing magic by the ass and pinning it against the wall. He was coming down from ninety-hour weeks, and this sounded like a great vacation if nothing else. Assuming that Bob was unhinged and the world wasn't going to come to an end. If it was true, then he'd be getting a head start on helping humanity. Not to mention being a powerful wizard.
On the increasingly likely chance that Bob was right, he flipped through his contacts, looking for Raul. Finding him, Jack started tapping out an email, letting him know that he was looking for a foundation guy and asking him if he was interested.
He'd met Raul his fourth week on the project. He'd been called out to a site where an old man had been calmly directing a work crew to tear up a freshly laid foundation. Jack had exploded, asking him why the fuck he was tearing up a perfectly good foundation. Raul had invited him to the site next door and then calmly shown him several flaws in the foundation that were only visible with a great deal of scrutiny, and then only to someone who knew what they were doing.
Jack wasn't someone to hold onto a losing position, so he'd apologized and then cajoled the man into inspecting all the foundations for the project.
It turned out that Raul had been a mason for the first twenty years of his career before a careless mistake had crushed his right hand, leaving it with almost no mobility. He'd rallied, taken his disability, and gone to college, earning a degree in civil engineering, before coming back to construction work. Over a beer, he'd heard a half-drunk Raul describe how he'd felt when he went to the disability office and proudly informed them that he was once again gainfully employed.
Raul was probably perfect for this. If Bob could fix his hand, he'd likely jump at the chance. He didn't have anything holding him here, as his wife had left when he'd been crippled, and they hadn't had kids.
"What's your email address?" Bob interrupted his thoughts.
"[email protected]," he replied.
"In the pipe," Bob muttered, clicking a few more times before closing his laptop.
Jack opened his phone and carefully read through the email. He was working his way through the paths when Vera called out from the kitchen, "Dinner is coming out; make sure the table is clear!"
His stomach betrayed him as it rumbled eagerly, the smell of lasagna wafting tantalizingly through the air as Vera and Tamila carried pans of Italian perfection to the table, Amanda following behind with Tony, carrying plates and silverware.
Jack sighed and tucked away his phone. He'd learned the hard way that focusing on something to the exclusion of eating was a bad habit to get into.