It was surreal, Wolfgang thought, for a young boy from Kenya to be sat in an alternate Wales, watching a god rebuild the newest member of his team while he ate a pretty good grilled fish and watched interestedly. Still, this wasn't the strangest thing he'd ever seen, it wasn't even in the top ten. Honestly after that dungeon where the trash had formed a union and were on strike, and there was the dungeon in the dungeon, but it was that kind of dungeon and... well there were things a man couldn't un-see. This wasn't top twenty now he thought about it.
After the rebuilding of Ishani had been completed, she was placed in a sort of protective cocoon while Ngaboux explained everything that they knew about the current situation to the rest of the party. "This realm, as I said, is a mirror of your realm. However, this cannot be the whole of the story. There's magic here, but the realm has clearly not grown with magic. The portal in your realm has magic coming out like any ordinary Gate, but it's not coming from here. The magic here appears to have a density that you'd associate with a category eight. That's disturbing in two ways, primarily, we've no clue of the mechanism by which a portal could have a different level of magic at each end like that, the magic equalises, that's how all your magictech works. I'm the god of magic for crying out loud, and I don't know how that could happen. It was this that made Chris think the dungeon was hidden between the two sides of the Gate, which would have rendered it incredibly unlikely, though technically possible. However, my passage through the gate showed me that this was not the case. This Gate is just a Gate. So, where is the magic here coming from?
"That's the second issue. It's possible that this realm has a second Gate to a dungeon, which is not impossible. But it's incredibly unlikely. There's also nearly no chance that the Gate would open to your realm close enough to a dungeon Gate to leak magic from one to the other. Not unless it was done deliberately. But who could do this? And why? Dungeons attach to realities to steal enough entropy to start themselves as true universes. You will speak of this to no one, but it's rumoured among we gods that our realm itself started as a dungeon. So why would a dungeon want to open a Gate to another reality from their host?"
At this point Chris butted in, "There's more to it than that, how are they opening the bridge? Because that's what a Gate is, it's a bridge from one universe to another. With a common dungeon, the bridge is... well I won't go into the details, but a useful lie is that the dungeon is like a soap bubble, and where it meets another bubble, a universe, the walls between them draw back and the pressure of the larger universe inflates the smaller one. So far, so ordinary. This second bridge is a dangerous thing though, it means that something in the dungeon knows how to make an intentional bridge using magic, since this is a dungeon gate, not a technological bridge like ours."
Ngaboux took up the narrative again, it was easy to see in moments like this, why Chris had become their avatar, they were simpatico incarnate. "This means that if there is a dungeon, and I think it's the most likely scenario, it's got knowledge we don't have. Think about that. It knows something about magic and dimensional tunnels that the god of magic and the person who's been studying dimensional bridges for three hundred years who also happens to be the avatar of the god of magic. What we don't know is if the Gate to your realm was intentionally aimed there. There's also the question of if the Gate to the dungeon, actually is a normal Gate, or if it's another bridge. We have very little information and very many questions. My time here is drawing near, I think even my circle will collapse soon. You're on a clock, but it's not as bad as you might think. You can happily eat this world's plants, animals and rocks, the water needs boiling but, you can surivive. Honestly there's a chance that the temporal strains will break the Gate from your realm. But at the same time, we need to know. Chris's protection is on all of you, except her" They gestured to Ishani down by their feet. "There are of course reasons for this, Chris has argued quite strenuously that she should recieve the same level of protection as you all, no matter the cost to him. But there's the prophecy, which was shockingly clear.
"We gods can sometimes predict the future from the state of the universe as we see it, same as you. The difference is we see a lot more than you can. That said, prophesy is different. That's when the universe gives us some knowledge we need, or rather that it needs us to know. Why isn't it straightforward you're probably thinking? Well, good question, and the answer that gods and mortals have come to is that it is as straightforward as the universe can make it. We're so amazingly insignificant compared to our mothers that they have distinct trouble making things simple enough for us to understand. But this one was amazingly clear. Chris has to be here, Ishani has to be here. Chris cannot grant Ishani his protection. How dire the situation must be that the universes, and it has to be at least three working together, would give us such a stark warning."
Shortly after that, the circle finally succumbed to the ravages of time and the circle was brought roughly into line with the flow of time in the rest of this universe. The magical backwash dissolved the cocoon around Ishani, knocked Wolfgang off his seat and made the incarnation of Ngaboux crumble to dirty dust.
Being the medic of the team, Wolfgang stood up and with surprising strength and insufficient leverage, he carried Ishani into the newly created living quarters that the attendants had built. There was a bed, a table, a chair, a lamp and a laptop. No team was expected to do deep missions like this without some entertainment, so a laptop and a local server with a few thousand movies, some games and a lot of music were standard issue. He placed Ishani in the bed and went to see what everyone else was doing.
Chris, Lin and Adili had claimed their own rooms, then congregated in the shared living area.
"Wolfgang, you'll be staying here with me for the first few days, we've got to get my sensor network set up. I'm afraid that we didn't pack a super computer, shocking oversight, so I'll be stealing time from all your laptops when you're not using them. I'll write the client later. For now, we'll all have a good night's sleep. Adili, Lin, I want you two to do a quick lap of the local area, go out about five clicks, circle round. Let's get some mapping done, you'll be putting down standard sensor packages every square kilometer. Righto, we've got maybe four hours to sunset, let's not waste it. Wolfgang, Lin, can you go and get the sensor crate? We can assemble a few of them tonight. Adili, you're in charge of getting the perimeter defences set up for tonight. By this time next week I want this place to be an absolute fortress."
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Wolfgang and Lin followed orders and went to fetch the crate. Wolfgang felt a bit surplus to requirements as Lin easily hoisted the several hundred kilo crate and began to carry it back, her feet sinking into the ground as she went.
"Chris is surprisingly happy considering that we're in a dungeon that's prophesied to break the world no matter what happens." he offered as he opened some doors. "And I'm worried about the newbie. She's too young to be here. Don't see how a slip of a child could be the difference between life and death anyway."
"That's because you're not a god. Like the deity said, they sense a lot more than us and this came from on high even for them. As for his nibs" her rocky face cracked into a smile as she said this part. "This is what he's dreamt about for centuries. This is going to be his Nobel Prize moment, he's researching something that is more important than nearly anything that's ever happened, and he's in accelerated time, so he gets to publish before anyone else even knows it's happening. Honestly this is his dream. If he had to choose between being the immortal avatar of the god of magic, or winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, he'd be digging through the snow in Stockholm before you could say 'review committee'." With a slight grunt she put the crate down in the living area and ripped the side of it off, the thick wooden panels tearing like paper. She looked down at her massive stone hands and then at the set of delicate tools needed to assemble the sensor packages. "Over to you then I guess."
For the next couple of hours, Lin went on a recce around their camp, while Wolfgang soldered, clipped and sealed the sensor packages. Adili, set up some basic rune traps, inactive until Lin came back and the whole set could be turned on at once.
While the rest of the team was either working or unconscious, Chris was sat on a beanbag, using his specialised oversized laptop with the extra large keyboard. He had his IDE open and was quickly chaining hack on top of hack to get a database of the sensor data set up on the entertainment server. Occasionally he'd mutter to himself about things like tail end recursion, embarrassingly parallel programming, and the fact that he was a genius.
It took Adili coming over with the evening meal as the sun set to shake him from his reverie, and his first words were "I thought you were supposed to be setting up the perimeter." Then he looked around and noticed that the sky was dark, and that the whole team was gathered together again. "Oh. Well I hope no one minds, but I've deleted all the country music off the server, I needed the space for the database. It might not be the last thing we lose though. I'm expecting a lot of data. I'll throw a message priortising every spare machine they can send through, but I have no clue if it'll make any difference."
He stared out the window, his eyes glazed as he looked and saw things none of the others could see, the data, the tools he'd need to build for the analysis, the fact he'd need some geospatial positioning to allow him to get directional data and...
"Earth two to Chris, come in. You've been looking out that window for fifteen minutes now. You should eat." Adili's voice was kind, but also concerned. "Your noodles are getting cold."
"Oh thanks, sorry. There's just so much we've got to do. I'll put you all down as co-authors of course. If you're going on patrol, do you think you'll need your laptops? They're pretty worthless outside the network and you know I could use all the grunt I can get. Hah! This is just like when I was young. I've not enjoyed myself so much in years!"
"Told you", Lin silently mouthed to Wolfgang as they sat listening.
That night sleep was hard to come by. The planet was quiet, insects and wolves being the only native sounds, sadly for the team there was also the sound of a leonine debugging a prototype, which involved a lot of swearing and aspersions being cast on the lineage of compiler authors everywhere. Eventually even the fervour of a new, all consuming project lost the battle to exhaustion and Chris slept at his desk, the rest of the team breathed a sigh of relief and tried to catch up on their own sleep.
It was somewhat later than planned the next morning when Adili and Lin set off, Chris having woken up at the last minute with detailed instructions on how to make a sextant and get their position within a few metres when they were placing the sensors. Their radios would work over the distances they were planning on going, but not through the mountains. There were passes and the plan was to pause for a comms break when they were aligned with the pass and the camp.
The erstwhile explorers set off and Wolfgang went back to Ishani's room to read and wait for her to wake up. Throughout the early afternoon she stirred a few times, clearly confused and not fully conscious. Eventually around mid-afternoon she awoke properly, and he told her to go and get cleaned up before food.
While Chris might have the extra doctorates, Wolfgang had been healing people for most of his life, and he was pretty certain that the fact Ishani's soul was in a different body to either of the others was going to take at least a little while to sort out. He doubted she was even aware of the cause of the dissonance she was certainly feeling, but he'd take time over the next few days to help guide her. The fact she meditated would probably speed things along, he thought.
The rest of the day was food and meditation for Ishani, trying to make Chris eat instead of play with his toys, and was punctuated only by the first check in from Lin, Adili being too busy setting up another sensor package. The news that the first sensors were online was enough to pull Chris from his latest rabbit hole. His old laptop, if you can call a machine he had taken out of his office that morning, outside time, old, had worked exactly as he had intended. The circle protecting it had been left unscathed as it wasn't trying to fight time. The storage on the machine was absolutely full of images. He was trying to move them to the server for analysis, "I hope no one likes Westerns, because I've had to delete those too"
Once he was alerted to the fact that the sensors were up though, he immediately switched to setting up the local receiver that routed the data from the sensors to the database.
The next few days passed the same way, Wolfgang acting like a therapist for Ishani and a nursemaid for Chris. Chris was in an uproar about some blurry images of something red in the sky behind smoke. Wolfgang wasn't certain what the fuss was about, since forest fires on the lower slopes of the opposing mountains would look very similar.
It was just after dinner on the third day that the call back from Lin and Adili threw their camp into uproar.