Let’s see…. Ah yes, I was telling my…uh.. Well the neighborhood witch that she’d likely created a kind of magical dam in an extraplanar region and so she’d have to do something about it.

Or at least that was my guess. Now we just had to figure out both the hard part and the easy part.

The easy part would be switching off the portal. The problem was going to be A) knowing how long to leave it switched off and B) being able to reconnect.

Unlike modern electronics, the magical community is rather… slow about adopting certain technologies and patterns and so the concept of pairing (like most of us know about with bluetooth and wifi) was… not exactly foreign, but definitely something that didn’t come as a natural progression.

So not only would the portal have to be reconfigured at the ‘sending’ end (thank Terra for what are effective 2-way wormholes - suck it SG1), said portal would have to have something to home in on. And given that Miss Skuld had never actually turned the portal off since she activated it, that made things extra problematic.

But I was being paid in very expensive herbs, so it was on me to figure it out.

As I said, first it needed switched off so it could be re-runed, which would take a few hours at a minimum and would require a bit of research to determine the right runes to create a means of ‘pairing’.

Then those same new ‘pair’ runes would have to be added to this far side. This would help, but again, both would have to be offline and whomever was on the ‘inside’ would be stuck there until the portal was re-established. And guess who the lucky winner on that one was?

Yeah, really…

But again, that’s how being a consultant works. Dirty jobs and at the mercy of clients who need your help, but given the circumstances, short of calling a few wizards who were better with runes, it was not going to be an easy solution regardless.

“How certain are you about my portal being the issue?” Miss Skuld asked as we looked at the arch that formed this side of the portal.

“Sufficiently based on what you’ve told me that I’d find it very hard to believe that it wouldn’t impact something,” I replied, sipping on a cider she’d thoughtfully provided from her garden’s fermenters.

“And that’s a tried and true technique is it?” she asked, rather more cheerfully than the harsh school mistress facade she normally wore.

“Oh yes. Turn it off and on again is practically the very first step. If you can replicate a problem after you’ve done that, that’s when you know you have a real problem,” I smiled slightly.

“Except we already know that it’s a problem or have you forgotten my poor golems?” she seemed slightly hurt.

“That’s not what I meant. But in short, it is a best standard practice at deliberately taking steps to fully reset a system from a base state or as close as you can get to it.”

She considered this and nodded.

“I’ll need to close my shop for the day then. I’ll have to get some spellcasting ingredients and a tracer in case this doesn’t work as simple as turning it off and on again,” her face already returning to the grey, neutral stone that was her normal.

“I’ll need to get some provisions and some camping equipment in case this takes longer than we expect,” I concurred with breaking for the day. “Do you know if there’s a good cross-planar communicator?”

“In theory, yes. But they are research institute issue only and they are exorbitantly expensive to operate, let alone borrow,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“How expensive are we talking?” I decided to ask before realizing it.

“Three 25 gram essentia crystals grade 8 or better per minute,” she said without even a pause.

I swallowed heavily. That was the equivalent of my fee of saffron every 10 minutes. I could afford some luxuries and some back-ups, but nothing of that magnitude.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to do without and we’ll have to be adequately certain of the pairing runes,” I said, shrugging, trying to not imagine being lost in the extraplanar realm for an indefinite future.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

“I’ll see if I can provide a means of making it auto apply. I don’t know how good your runes are and I’d hate to make this any harder than necessary in trying to guess between your runes and my own,” she said, in the tones of one who is already certain that your penmanship is not up to standard.

Being fair, she was absolutely correct.

I knew some about runes, but only enough to get into trouble. A bit like being able to read a bit of code, but not enough to actually fix it and more likely to just make a mess of it and/or break it.

I finished the cider and set the wooden mug back onto the table where we had been sitting, pondering a solution.

We rose as one and walked to the portal. I looked at it as closely as I could without my eyes watering. It seemed to be fairly standard, but was clearly formed by some very special vines which had the runes engraved on them. Certainly nothing I’d want to have to try and recreate.

She appeared to think for a moment at the edge of the portal and turned around, looking out at the garden.

I turned with her, in case there was something my senses had missed.

Seeing nothing, I turned to see what direction she was looking in. In doing so, I saw her raise her hands to full extent and a strange kind of warping seem to emanate from her fingertips.

You know that heat waves on the road, making you see water at a distance? It was the same kind of strange bending of air and light, except up-close.

Of course, being around a djinn who can leak fire from their fingertips when adequately upset, I was not overly concerned, but I knew better than to say anything until Miss Skuld was doing whatever it was she was doing.

It took about 30 seconds, but the bending light faded and nothing appeared to have changed.

“May I inquire as to what you just did?” I asked as we turned back to the portal together.

“My golems will now protect you if it becomes necessary and they will respond, to a degree, if you command them,” she said.

“Protect me from what?” I prompted.

“From if you’re wrong,” she said and we stepped through the portal.

–

We said our goodbyes from there and I left through the front, deciding to hail a rideshare to the local sporting goods store that had a grocery next door.

I thought hard about her last statement.

I couldn’t deny that she was right. I was effectively toying with magic concepts that didn’t have to follow my simple baseline logic. And if there was some malicious force at play, it was someone either targeting her or potentially targeting me by proxy.

Alternately, there was also the strong risk that in doing this, I could be stuck in her garden for days, week, or even months if we couldn’t manage to do this right. At a minimum, someone of equivalent or better extraplanar skills would have to find me, create a portal to me (even a one-time portal would be problematic), have a homing signal to get us back to the right plane, and then portal us back. Such a specialist would be worth a lot more than me, but seeing as this was her garden and not lightly created, I didn’t suspect that she’d be looking to maroon me in extraplanar space.

The rideshare was nice and quiet, which is always a benefit, and I wandered through the camping section of the sporting good store.

For an outing like this, where good weather was a guarantee and I could probably get by with very simple items, the biggest challenge was going to be cooking and keeping anything cool.

I hadn’t asked whether it would be ok for me to have a small fire or not or if there was a means of refrigeration. I decided that the simplest answer would be no on both, at least for anything other than a root cellar or some equivalent (since she did have to keep the fermenters somewhere).

And while essentia or similar powered ‘field equipment’ existed, that got expensive and was usually reserved for teams of wizards on expeditions.

So MREs, dried/freeze-dried foods, and self-heating chemical packs were going to be my friends in this. Imperfect, but without having a better idea on what I was looking at, it was better than surviving on purely fruit and veg (which I know some people manage to do, but I’m not them).

Water wasn’t going to be a problem and given the cider, neither was alcohol if I did end up there for days on end.

Power could be a problem for entertainment, so I grabbed a small solar panel with USB charging and included battery.

I decided on a camping hammock with straps instead of bolts and grabbed a few other odds and ends for hygiene. I thought the clerk was going to swallow their eyes at seeing my fully stocked cart and when I declined any bags, but they dutifully checked me out and I pushed the cart outside and around the corner, just enough to be out of line of sight of anyone except in the immediate before I started loading it all in my bag.

Yes, that’s right dear readers, I have a Mary Poppins/Dr. Who ‘bigger on the inside’/D&D ‘bag of holding’ backpack. And I love it. It’s the first and best thing I invested in when I kicked off my fully independent consulting. Anything that goes in is stacked according to some kind of internal warehousing and if you go looking for something, the enchantment on the bag listens and will lift up whatever it is that you’re asking for. I have a hard time believing that I’ve never had anything like it before or what I would do without it.

Once I finished up at the sporting goods, I decided to skip the grocery, since most of what I could come up with was items that either needed freezing/refrigeration or needed some kind of intense heat source. Since I would likely be lacking both, I would simply do without.

Caffeine was going to be a ‘problem’ but I had some cold beverage instant caffeine type flavored water mix that I could get by on, so that was sound enough for me to press forward on.

Another ride-share to the corner nearest the apartment and into the apartment I went, vanishing from the world outside and realizing that I hadn’t gotten the herbs I’d gone to Miss Skuld’s to get in the first place.

Oh well, my pasta with meatballs and marinara sauce would just have to do without.

That is, until Lucy and Warren found out about my plan for the next day and possibly longer if things didn’t go right. But I’ll get to that later.

For now, it’s a beautiful day and I intend to spend it doing as little as possible.