"Why my little dragon, I didn't know you cared so much." Said the elf outside the lift, casually reaching out a hand to stop the lift doors closing while Chris stood there gaping. "Anyway I was commanded to come here by Lthandro on the advice of Ngaboux. Do you ever even listen to your god?"

Ishani gasped as she realised who this person was. "You're Robert the Farseer aren't you? The hidden avatar!"

The putative Robert sagged somewhat as he heard the sobriquet "Please don't call me that. I'm not some sort of secretive hermit, I'm just not allowed to leave. And it's this hairy idiot's fault. Has he told you why everything is such a pain here yet? Yes, the whole thing about how magic works, why we only have small high magic areas, spell casting, everything all his fault. Me being trapped in this sodding dome while he gets to swan off around the sodding globe? His fault."

"Thanks for that, you could go out you know, if you took a portable with you." Chris replied, having somewhat regained his composure. "And as for the rest, I thought it was a hallucination, you know that. Anyway it was luck that you won the rock paper scissors and got to go home while I tended the simulation. You know, no one has ever asked me for the results of that simulation? It's been three hundred years, I've got the report ready to go. No one asked."

"As annoying as you are when you're right, I guess you're right." Looking at the team of five who'd filed out of the lift and into the narrow corridor leading to the armoury, Robert shook himself and turned back to Chris. "Anyway, why I'm here. Weren't you listening to your god? You have to take the newbie with you. She has to be there, you're going to need her. If she's there with you, you've got a fifty percent chance of dying. If she's not there, you're pretty much certain to die. If you're not there, everyone in this realm dies." He reached his long fingers out to pull his pince-nez off his nose and massage it while he looked at the floor. "This is going to be bad. So bad. I can't tell you more, I don't know any more. The gods themselves can only see the outline of this one. There's something off in that dungeon. It's going to break this realm one way or another. Anyway, go to the armoury, look in the third vault, take the best thing you see on the second shelf from the floor on the right as you enter. I'm talking to you, newbie. Lion-o, you need her."

With that last rather straightforward clue the extravagantly dressed elf strode toward the lift his immaculately tailored suit jacket flaring out behind him. The whole edifice was only slightly spoilt by the lift having been called from another floor, resulting in Robert standing waiting and pointedly not looking back while the orange light on the wall glowed mockingly.

Taking pity on his friend, Chris gathered his team, newbie included, and took them down the corridor to the antechamber of the armoury.

Most of The Dome was a cramped affair, looking much like any expensive office in a city where space was at such a premium that even the rich lived cramped. The core area, where Chris' office was, was the old physics department of the local university. The grounds and eventually road, air above and earth beneath becoming part of the structure. Its edge clearly delineated at the point where the magical density dropped below the important threshold of atmospheric saturation. Inside this volume there's consistently more mana than the air itself can hold. This means that all uses of magic no longer require removing mana from the surrounding air alone, many simple applications can be powered by the ambient free mana.

The centre of course is the Bridge in the office next door to Chris', where the laws of the other realm bleed into ours bringing magic to our otherwise barren world. This meant that any kind of life that requires ambient mana, any research that needs it and all higher magictech applications have to happen inside The Dome. So every cubic metre is accounted for and used to the maximum. The Armory seemed to flout that rule. The room before them was definitely inside The Dome, if only just. But it was definitely not small.

White marble floors, polished wood counters, plush sofas, potted plants and discreet nooks with velvet seating and tables. It looked like the foyer of the more expensive species of bank, unlike any other armoury of a paramilitary force. The only hint that the room was connected to a weapons cache was the subtle pattern of swords and bows on the upholstery and what carpeting there was. The main stretch of carpeting ran from the double door entrance to a long and low counter of dark wood polished to a warm glow, behind which sat a hulking shape.

Seeing the party enter, the shape unfolded itself from the overstuffed armchair it had been sat in. "You're finally here" the booming voice rang out from the fanged mouth of a female black leonine. Her muzzle was white with age, but her body was that of an active person in the bloom of youth. "You stop to sight see or something? Arun wants you wheels up in thirty minutes, it'd be a stretch if I sent you back now."

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"Mary, good to see you. We had a run in with Robert. Got some... interesting information. Has Arun told you the actual category for this dive?" Lin leant forward and slammed her rocky fist into the Leonine's midsection, or tried to. Mary's paw grabbed it out of the air and her return swipe, with claws out, caught nothing but air as Lin danced back. "At least you're not going to seed down here then."

"Hah! I worry about you, gallivanting about in planes, visiting exotic dungeons and killing them. What do you mean about the category anyway? Arun told me it was pretty certain it was a four, so you guys are overkill."

"Yeah, not a category four. It was manifesting three days ago, which means it's at least a six, potentially an eight. We're cleared to take what we need and I want to go in loaded for a nine. I don't think I can justify a ten, but I wish that I could. We're cleared for a portable too."

"OK, how long is the trip?" Mary pulled a tablet out from a pouch on her hip and started to make some notes.

"Timeboxed to sixty days, subjective, before we nuke it. But let's take three months worth of supplies for five just in case. Ratio's 12:1 and rising. Could be an extraction. Standard atmo, thank the gods, normal gravity. No clue about the inhabitants. What can you do? Oh and Robert told us to send the new kid to the third and she can pick 'the best thing on the second shelf from the bottom on the right as you enter.' which is both strangely precise and bloody cryptic."

"Vault three? Vault three's just junk we've found in archaeological digs that's clearly from the other side. The natural bridges were like Wolfgang, short, brutish and nasty. They did not leave the stuff that fell through them in the best shape. But if Robby said it..." she gestured and seemingly materialising from nowhere a human in a sombre suit appeared at her side. She squinted as some people did when casting < inspect > and looked at Ishani. "Take Ishani here to the third vault, let her take the one item and bring her back."

Ishani looked at the person who came to lead her away. They were definitely human, definitely, but beyond that they seemed to not have any age, ethnicity, sex, they were just... human in some indefinable way.

"Homunculus" Mary let her know, "They're technically powered by souls, and they're human in shape. Plus no feathers. So your brain says 'Oh it's a human', don't worry about it, they're perfectly safe"

While Ishani let herself be led away, the rest of the team started bombarding Mary with requests for what they were sure that they'd need. Adili apparently definitely needed a magically powered tablet and a full entertainment suite.

The hubub of the antechamber faded into the background as the homunculus guided her through a door she swore wasn't there a moment before, which opened on to a corridor done out in the same grand fashion as the antechamber. The corridor curved until Ishani was sure that they must be walking through the antechamber again, until the corridor looped around again, and she realised that the white walls and floor hid a gentle slope. They were spiralling down under The Dome.

After what appeared to be fifteen minutes of brisk walking, they eventually arrived at a small hallway with doors on both sides. The attendant walked to the second door on the right, a heavy dark wooden affair with highly polished brass door furniture on some truly massive hinges. From a pocket they retrieved a key on a golden chain, the key did not seem to match the keyhole, until the attendant turned it in the air in some indescribable way and without much fanfare, they were holding a key that slid into the lock like it was greased and turned silently. The door swung out into the hallway, allowing Ishani to catch a glimpse of a thick wooden face on an even thicker steel vault door, which promptly became an ordinary, if imposing, door as she watched. The homunculus gestured to her, indicating that she should enter the vault.

OK, second shelf from the bottom on thr right, choose the best thing. Guess that means I can't be wrong she stepped forward confidently, after all it was juat grabbing something from a room and walking back. How hard could it be.

She stepped through a doorway that was simultaneously a few steps through an incredibly thick wall, and a single step through a normal brick wall.

The view inside was not what she had been expecting. In her mind's eye, this room was perhaps four by five metres, the shelving standard steel units, two or three shelves high.

Instead she saw what appeared to be a staircase, it went down, even deeper below the earth. At the bottom she stepped off the last stair and onto a gangway, a gangway perhaps ten metres above the floor of what appeared to be a warehouse.

"Which is the second shelf from the bottom on the right as I enter the room?" The question was meant rhetorically, but the attendant appeared to take it as an actual request and walked past her and down a ladder, she followed hurriedly. When her feet touched the floor again, she saw the attendant pointing at a shelf higher up than she was tall. Some of the artefacts on the bottom shelf were truly massive.

The shelves appeared to have been hewn out of the bedrock beneath Delhi and there were ladders leading up to each level. Each storey, shelf was too small a word for these, was at least three metres wide, and they looked to be a hundred or more metres long, with stone arches supporting them every five or so metres.

Ishani climbed up to the second level and looked at the mess in front of her. The items here were much smaller than the lower shelf, none bigger than her head, but there were literally thousands of them in space in front of her. The closer ones appeared to be potsherds, various broken implements and other junk.

"Time to start looking I guess. How will I know what's best, I do not know. Oh, well." With that, she started walking, carefully placing her feet between the haphazardly strewn detritus of an otherworldly civilisation.