No more Dungeons that are holes in the Earth, I decided. Not yet anyway.

While Torrdok has some meetings at the new Academy we are definitely not invited to, I take Logan on a quick tour for a few hours of Milford Sound and Queenstown. I show him the classics right from the Sandflies through Wargs and the Ice Arena Dungeon. We breeze through the journey that I barely survived the first time, even though the Monsters are stronger now after the latest Influx. With nobody holding them in check the predatory food chain keeps rising to become more and more powerful.

With the ability to build rapidly using Mana and Credits and the technologies available to someone like Tenebris, the Academy will be in place shortly. It will use the entirety of the South Island in the same way the Academy we’ve just been at uses the surrounding area for hunting and training, although the South Island of New Zealand is vastly larger and more full of threats because of the very high AMLs. I can imagine this place would support a very large contingent and perhaps that’s a main reason behind why Tenebris wanted it.

Logan and I are sitting high up in the outskirts of Queenstown at what used to be my temporary home here. He’s got a high powered plasma rifle resting on the edge of the balcony and fires every few seconds at the target rich environment racing around below us. Occasionally a flock of carnivorous geese flies at us or something very adventurous tries to close in on us from another angle, so I blast them with Psychic Eruption to get practice with my new Skill and to leave Logan to focus on what he’s doing. I’m finding my new Skill very versatile and powerful, although nothing here has been particularly powerful or had high Resistances.

“Yes! Another Level!” Logan exclaims.

“Fifteen?” I ask, barely able to keep track.

Logan nods and holds out his hand.

“Dab me up, Uncle B.”

I raise an eyebrow at him but don’t leave him hanging.

“Speaking of, I really need to get out and Level myself Logan. You want me to take you back to your folks?”

“Yeah,” he says, smiling. “Love to.” When things are uncomfortable Logan doesn’t get serious, his way of dealing with it comes out in fidgeting and laughter. That’s one way he’s different, and probably an improvement, from his dad and uncles.

“You’ll keep an eye on them with Foresight, right Uncle Bronwic? If people are looking for us, I don’t want them to find us in Calgary.”

I pause and look at Logan with a new appreciation. His brown hair is hanging almost down into his eyes and he looks older than his age, but maybe he’s been forced to grow up a lot faster than he should have been too. It’s clear he’s carrying some mental and emotional weight of his own around.

“Yeah mate, I’ve got that tuned so that anything involving the family will hit me right away, even if it’s not super dangerous. Doesn’t help me if your dad goes looking for danger, but if something’s trying to find them I’m definitely going to know about it.”

It’s one of the things I’ve been most grateful for over the last while - nothing else has tried to hold Carter and his family against me. No more assassination attempts, no more threats. I’m almost positive there will come another time, so my anxiety about it was riding high while my Skills weren’t working properly. Now that things with my Skills seem to mostly be back to normal, I've been able to relax a bit.

I trigger Omnipresent and see that Calgary is near dusk and bitterly cold with snow swirling everywhere. Huge drifts, even bigger than some of the biggest ones when we were kids, have blown up against the house and completely cover the front door and halfway up the walls, up to the bottom of the second floor windows. The roof is so thick with snow that I’m betting if the house wasn’t part of the Settlement, if Mana wasn’t strengthening it, the roof might have collapsed by now. I sigh and manifest the Portal, old feelings about the cold and the wind and the snow creeping in. Why do we live in places where we can’t go outside without freezing our asses off for two thirds of the year?

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Logan and I step through the Portal into the snow drifts and the cold wind blasts us. It must be 40 below and I register the way it pulls at the heat from our bodies and tries to suck our energy, but it doesn’t affect either one of us. I look around like I always do when I return here and remember what it was like when we were kids. The roads were always bumpy, icy, and dirty from all the neighborhood cars driving through the Crescent and parking. None of that exists now. The streets are smooth, the snow is clean. The dusk light is gloomy and shrouded until I dial up my Perception with a thought and I’m able to see everything as if it’s the middle of a sunny, clear day. With a sigh I start trudging up the buried path to the front door.

“Wait!” says Logan through the howling wind. My Perception picks it up easily. “I want to try something.”

I stop and turn to him then gesture with a ‘be my guest’ motion.

Without saying anything, Logan raises his hands up, palms forward, and closes his eyes momentarily, then opens them again. As soon as he does I notice a difference with my enhanced Perception. It seems like the storm around us has lost some of its energy, but the effect doesn’t go far. I reach out with my Mana Affinity and feel a swirling, pulsing force around Logan. No fanfare at all accompanies Logan clapping his hands together in front of him. An instant after he does, the snow drifts in front of the house are obliterated into swirling powder that launches into the air at high speed and rushes past us in a cloud.

I raise my eyebrows and give him a few appreciative nods that get his smiling face grinning even wider.

“Definitely a work on!” I encourage him, the possibilities for anything from movement to combat flicking through my mind at light speed.

“I hope Mom’s home,” he says as he passes me and knocks on the front door. I wait for a bit before I join him so that he can properly greet his brother and sisters. Benjamin is still so young, just a little boy that looks a lot like a miniature version of his big brother. But he is so cool, stomping around on the front step in the cold. Steam pours out of his mouth and nose as he smashes his little hands together to try to move the snow like his big brother’s just done.

It’s not long before everyone moves inside and I take the next couple steps up to the front door. In their excitement to see Logan they’ve ignored me and I’m totally comfortable with that. Part of me hopes that Dana and Carter will feel good that Logan has progressed his Levels and has lots of interesting stories to tell, but I know that’s ambitious since they’d view that as the absolute minimum trade-off for their son heading off into the unknown. No kudos for bringing him back alive, and none deserved or asked for.

I pause at the front door. The cold pulls at me and freezes my breath on my eyelashes. Then, rather than opening the door, I glance over at Tatiana’s house. Is she with someone? Is she there? Would it be complicated?

Maybe it’s best to let Logan have some time to reconnect with everyone alone, I decide. A quick march through the deep snow gets me in front of her door, assuming this is still where she lives. Of course I could use Omnipresent or even my Perception to find out, but I don’t want to. I’m not sure if I’ll even knock. I’m just… here.

I take a deep breath and let it out in a huge billow of steam, heaps of emotions flowing. Standing here, feeling isolated, connected, resolute, tired, more than human, less than human. I close my eyes and just focus on being. On me.

Then… something clicks and the world shifts. Everything feels different, like a fog has lifted from my mind and soul. I feel somehow more solid, more in the world, more… full of potential and power, like the world could bend around me. Notifications light up everywhere and I open my eyes, unsure of what’s going on but ready to open them to find out.

Instead I lock eyes with Tatiana, who’s opened the door and looks up at me with a wide grin that gives me a jolt. She’s dressed in what I can only assume is necromancer chic, with tight leather pants and boots under a long, thick flowing dark cloak which could just be for warmth, but something about it says there’s a lot more to it. And under it, I add to myself. Her pale white skin, athletic figure, and the way she moves are always a bit mind-bending. Not like Alana, she’s on another planet - beautiful like something you admire rather than the pure attraction that Tatiana exudes.

“Hey!” I say lamely. “Bad timing…”

The notifications blink at me insistently and despite how I feel about Tatiana it’s tough to focus on her. The shift in how I feel is amazing but a bit disorienting. It feels like an avalanche of new knowledge is poised behind those notifications to crash into me.

“There’s never a bad time to see you, Bronwic,” she says with a tilt of her head as she opens the door fully. “Where do we need to go?”

I see the willingness to leave with me like she has before, the interest and the desire to spend time together no matter what happens. It confuses me and gives me a thrill at the same time. It also means I know I can’t take her up on it.

“Maybe… inside?” I suggest. “I’ve got a lot of notifications to open that I think are going to be pretty complicated. Perhaps you’d like to help me figure out what they mean over a drink?”

“Sounds good,” she agrees and steps back. “You don’t need an invitation.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know she’s saying that in the broadest possible way. I stride through the doorway with a grin of my own.