Norman massaged his temples as he felt another migraine coming on. It was going on three weeks since he had come to California and he felt like they weren’t any closer to coming up with a solution to the collapses. Thankfully, he didn’t have to worry about what Donovan and Vincent were up to with his wife anymore. Kalia was already back in Ashvale getting the mitigation efforts up and running.

“How about this?” One of the researchers wrote out a series of steps on the board.

“That’s fine and dandy,” Another spoke up, “but do you know how to implement them?”

It went back and forth like that for days. Everyone had grand ideas on how to ‘Save the World’ but most – including Norman – didn’t have the first idea how to go about it.

It wasn’t until a new researcher showed up that they started making some progress.

“Ms. Patel, care to weigh in?” The first researcher asked.

This woman had simply shown up out of the blue during a furious round of arguments the day before. From what he had been able to gather, she had been studying the fabric of reality since before the collapse, making her the foremost human expert on the subject. The reason she wasn’t originally invited to this project was that she didn’t have a calling. Not that a calling made you an expert. After spending three weeks with these so-called experts, he could easily point out the ones who weren’t very bright. That didn’t apply to this woman. She was brilliant enough that she had managed to work out some magic on her own. She just couldn’t cast any of it.

The woman of Indian descent looked over the man’s notes with a clinical eye. “I don’t believe it will be enough,” she said after a few minutes.

The man sagged, but Patel wasn’t done. She grabbed a marker from the board and began writing. “You are thinking too small. Your idea will encompass the world we inhabit, but we need to take into account other worlds yet to fall. What conditions must we impose on them? Do we simply want to ensure they remain stable?”

The list of conditions grew and grew. And others chimed in for things she might have missed.

Even Norman spoke up. “We need to take into account broken arrays.”

That got the room to pause and look at him.

“You think people would deliberately damage our only means of survival?” Patel asked with shock.

“I think people are dumb and panicky, so yes. But I wasn’t even considering that aspect so much as them being inadvertently damaged or destroyed by forces beyond our control.”

“Can’t we just shield it with a mana barrier?” One guy in the back asked.

“No,” Norman and Patel responded in unison.

He nodded toward the woman, letting her take the lead on explaining why that wouldn’t work.

“The mana requirement to protect the spell arrays would triple the time it takes them to charge.”

Norman didn’t think it was quite that bad but even if it just doubled the time, it would mean their plan failed before it even started.

The group worked through the list of requirements. Some were dropped as unfeasible. Others were lumped into groups that a single magical symbol could accomplish, while others were added.

Eventually, a spell form began to take shape as people with specific knowledge of certain symbols and their quirks added them to the design.

Norman would like to say this first attempt was a winner, but it wasn’t even close. “It won’t work,” he stated simply, earning groans of annoyance from everyone present.

Everything was erased and they started from the beginning.

This process repeated a dozen times before Norman stared at a working spell diagram. It was the most convoluted spell he had ever seen. And he had no idea what most of it did. “It’ll work.” The room erupted into cheers. He waited for them to settle down before he continued. “But… Who here can say they can craft an array of this complexity?”

Looking at it, Norman wasn’t even sure he could recreate this array with any confidence. It wasn’t like he could mentally project an array like he could a spell in his mind. At least he wasn’t sure if it was possible. He had never really tried. All his work and research had gone into furthering his spell casting when he learned just how inefficient arrays were compared to enchantments. Now he wished he had spent some time researching multi-dimensional arrays. Then again, even if he did know how to build something like that, he would have to teach others that knowledge before it could be put into practice. Better to stick to what everyone knows.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

As he looked around the room, only a few hands went up at his question. One of them came from a Fariken scientist that he wouldn’t have trusted to draw within the lines of a coloring book, let alone a spell array. The other two were jorik. Those two he at least thought might be able to recreate this mess. But two out of twenty was not good odds.

He shook his head. “We need to simplify it, otherwise we will never have enough time to create all the arrays we need.”

Instead of erasing the spell, someone circled it and wrote ‘DO NOT ERASE!’ in big red letters before pushing the whiteboard off to the side.

It took another day and eighteen more failed attempts before they got something a little clearer and easier to reproduce. Five hands went up that time, including Normans. But he knew they could push it further. And so they did.

By the time they decided on a finished product, they had ten working versions of the spell. It had been stripped down to the bare essentials, removing things like protections for the local environment in the case of catastrophic failure. Safety systems designed to prevent idiots from stumbling inside the spell and getting vaporized were removed. They were deemed redundant since the spell was only active after the array completed charging.

While Norman didn’t understand the inner workings of the spell, the group had ultimately chosen to focus on reinforcing the barrier between this world and the others. It was thought that this would be the easiest way to prevent other planets from collapsing. It was also the cheapest approach since there was no need to guess how many worlds still remained intact. That little bit of missing information negated a lot of other options they considered.

Ms. Patel had said her math worked out to anywhere from ten to one hundred planets that could still be out there. But even if they were off by one, it would prove catastrophic. That was simply too big of a risk to take. So they threw it out and simply worked with what they knew.

As the last spell was unveiled, over eighty percent of the hands went up, stating they could confidently recreate the spell if needed. It was as good as they were likely going to get. Unless they spent months fine-tuning the spell or looking for easier-to-draw alternatives to some of the symbols.

That time was not something anyone was willing to waste. Charging the array was going to be a close thing as it was.

Norman recreated the spell on paper for everyone present, since his ability to tell if a spell would work or not meant that he knew the copies would work. These were distributed to everyone present and then photocopied for more researchers and scientists.

Mylara, the Gorfan chief scientist walked up for her copy. “I must admit, I didn’t think we would get this far.”

“Then why did you even come?”

She shrugged. “Personal preservation I suppose. …If this works and the world is saved…”

“You will be looking for vengeance?” He finished for her.

She smiled. “Just so.”

“You are welcome to give it a try,” he stated tersely, which caused her to titter lightly before walking away.

Oomaku collected her copy, only nodding to him before stepping away. There were two people Norman was surprised not to see. Donovan and Vincent had been noticeably absent in the last few days.

That didn’t mean that their flunkies weren’t still here. There were quite a few mages from the Council still around. He could tell they were Council mages based on the way they held themselves. Like they were better than everyone else. It was also easy to see who they were by how they refused to acknowledge Ms. Patel because she was a non-mage, even though the woman had practically saved the entire project.

If the woman noticed, she didn’t seem to care. Their dirty glares seemed to slide right off of her.

Norman wished they could selectively cut out zones from this spell. There were a few he would gladly abandon. But doing so would destabilize the entire array, ending in a cascade failure that would doom everyone. So that was a bad idea.

He finished handing out the last copies and headed for the door.

“Lord Norman, a moment of your time please?” He paused at the door and turned to Ms. Patel.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Patel?”

“Please, call me Arya.”

“Ok, Arya.”

At first, Norman thought the woman might have some interest in him, but her expression didn’t support that hypothesis. No, she looked conflicted.

“I have a brother…” She launched into a story about how her brother couldn’t cope with the changes wrought in the world and had eventually drunk himself to death.

“So you want me to revive him?”

“I know it is a lot to ask. But he is all the family that I had.”

Norman sighed. “Even if I agree to bring him back, it won’t change who he is.”

“I know,” she started to tear up. “But now that I know his demons, I can help ensure he doesn’t fall down that hole again.”

“Normally I would say no. There are reasons I don’t go grave robbing or have people picking up dead from other zones. Even now people look down on the undead, why give them more reason to hate us? But… seeing as you were instrumental in providing a solution to save the world. I think I can bend my rules this one time.”

“Thank you so much! You won’t regret this.”

“Just don’t expect me to step in if his demons catch up to him again. We should hurry to wherever he is buried, I wish to return home to my wife and friends.”

He followed the woman to a mausoleum, pretty confident it was a trap to get him alone. Likely put in place by Donovan or Vincent. So he was a bit shocked when the woman’s whole story turned out to be genuine. He resurrected the brother and watched quietly in the background as she laid into him for a good twenty minutes before profusely thanking him and pulling her brother away by the ear.

Norman could only shake his head in surprise and motion for his two guards. The pair materialized out of the darkness and they all returned to the car and a long trip home.

When he arrived, he took in a deep lungful of the fresh air of Normenia. It was good to be home.

The moment of calm and peace lasted for all of thirty seconds before Eugene approached him.

Norman audibly groaned. “Can’t I get at least a day off?”