Chapter 1 – Exploration

“Any luck?” Lucy asked, as Callum opened his eyes.

“Not yet,” Callum said.

“Maybe the moon just isn’t the best place to find somewhere livable,” Lucy suggested.

“I suspect you’re right,” Callum agreed. “It can’t be coincidence that there were so many portal worlds that had perfectly breathable atmospheres on Earth’s surface. In the grand scheme of things, the surface takes up basically zero percent.”

Up to that point, he’d only been opening portals from the far side of the moon, thanks to the portal nexus he’d put on the moon’s surface, or in the dragonlands. There was no way he was risking the Earth with a passage to some terrible hellscape. Which had been the right choice, back when he’d first started. Now that he had some grasp of the subtleties of dimensional portal creation, it was probably time to experiment somewhere closer to home.

“Then we can stop crashing at Chester’s place,” he muttered, but Lucy just laughed.

“It’s not too bad here,” she said. “I like the house better, but not without water, or when it’s…” She pursed her lips. “Well, perched on a big dirt patch in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah,” Callum sighed. After GAR had found out where his bunker was in Mexico, he’d needed to move the entire house and cave-cache, but that meant there was no water or sewer. The electricity still worked, since he could feed his infinite-portal setup from the portal world connections. At least Chester’s people had repaired the damage from when the GAR hit squad had broken through the back door and wall.

“Alright, I think I’ve got enough juice for two more today.” Callum rubbed at his temples. He’d been wringing himself dry trying to find a useful portal, and even though it’d only been three days since he’d closed the Night Lands portal he was frustrated by his lack of progress.

The old adage was that when it rained, it poured. Callum had managed almost two years of relative quiet, time enough to train his own magic and learn a few tricks, but with the closure of the Night Lands portal everything was happening at once. He had to find new and useful portal worlds, he had relocate his house and his family, and he had to worry about the forces that were stirring in Faerie.

All that was almost too much to handle, but just handling it wasn’t enough. If all he did was react to their moves, he would never get anywhere. There were thousands of mages, entire Houses, and the Guild of Arcane Regulation that were still arrayed against him. Worse, they had no compunctions about targeting ordinary people, even if it was just to punish him.

There was an enormous amount to do, both for himself and his allies, but it all started with the portal worlds. An untouched but habitable portal world would be an unassailable redoubt for him and, potentially, his allies. If he could find multiple ones, even better.

“For luck,” Lucy said, leaning over to give him a kiss. He held her close for a moment, then released her and focused on his spatial perceptions.

The moon nexus had grown to fifteen connections. Three were connected to space drones – one of which was actually in the dragonlands – and one each to a drone located in the Night Lands and the Deep Wilds. The rest were in more conventional remotes scattered throughout the world.

If he tried to run his senses through all of them it’d overwhelm him instantly, so for the most part he restricted his passive perception to his cave cache and whichever drone he was working with. That did run the risk of someone happening across one of the drones while he wasn’t paying attention, but they were all parked somewhere normally inaccessible. Inside a duct, in a space between walls, or inside some forgotten junction box on an overgrown property, whatever place seemed the safest.

He selected the drone he kept in Australia, in the vicinity of Portal World Five, and teleported the little frame he used for dimensional portal tests down there. Since he never knew what would be on the other end of the portal, he only ever opened it inside a box with six inch thick steel walls. Even that probably wasn’t really sufficient, but it was the best he had.

Making a new dimensional portal required pushing vis through four different foci that each created a braided torus, doing most of the heavy lifting while he got the angles and sizes exactly right. Lucy had actually printed out a wireframe of the best working portal structure for him, one that consistently connected to portal worlds with mana, to make it even easier to compare structures and make sure he was doing it right. A physical example was far easier than trying to parse models on a screen.

When he’d used that structure on the moon, it’d gone to a section of alien space with what looked like stone discs floating around in vacuum. But he’d seen that some portal worlds were far smaller than a planet — the Deep Wilds and Night Lands both seemed to be fairly limited — and there probably wasn’t actually anything outside that liminal space. The concept of a reality simply stopping bothered him, but that seemed to be how it worked. The distance between Earth and the Moon was larger than a planet, so he was tentatively thinking that opening the same kind of portal from Earth’s surface might go somewhere else entirely.

He double-checked the model and then shoved his vis into the portal structure, his teeth gritted and hands gripping the chair arms as he focused. The portal strained against space, ripping open a hole to a different dimension, and his perceptions found mana and atmosphere on the other side. The destination wasn’t even that much distorted from normal space, which was one reason he’d been focusing on that variant. The atmosphere was proof that he’d been right, and that the same portal structure let him access different places depending on where he opened it. He teleported a drone through, and looked at the feed.

What he saw was a massive stretch of water and rock, glimmering in bright light from something very like a sun overhead. Grey stone outcroppings jutted up from what looked to be a shallow ocean, with sand breaching the surface here and there. Small straggles of green clung to the sides of the juts, which was the only speck of color on them.

It wasn’t really that promising, but neither was it terrible. The sound of rushing water came through the microphone, and on closer inspection it seemed the tide was coming in. Or going out. It was flowing at a tremendous pace, scouring away and depositing sand at a visible rate. Callum winced, thinking about how much force that water had, but it wasn’t something horrifying like the sun-eyed beast he’d seen in one of his first portal explorations.

“Hey, it worked!” Lucy said, peering over his shoulder. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

“Not at all,” Callum agreed. “Not exactly somewhere to live, but at least a place to survey for enchantment material. I’ll leave a drone there.” If nothing else, it’d be great as a mana source to keep his nexus stable and give him extra sustainability through his gut portal. “And I’ll also put out the habitability test.”

They didn’t have any fancy chemical analysis hardware, but just because it looked like normal sky and greenery didn’t mean it was actually safe to breathe the air or drink the water. The simplest expedient was to just teleport a cage with a couple mice over to the portal world and observe. If they didn’t keel over and die or grow extra heads or anything, it was probably relatively safe.

Going somewhere himself would take more than that, but if he wanted to start providing alternate portal worlds for his allies, all he needed was something with value. A full House of mages could wring inestimable value from a portal world that was useless to him. He let the dimensional portal drop, relaxing as the vis drain vanished and the drone stayed in contact through its own portal anchor. So far he hadn’t had any issues connecting to portal worlds when the initial dimensional connection was severed, but he didn’t trust that would always be the case.

“Guess we aren’t going to be having a beach day,” Lucy said as she studied the drone’s feed. “Kind of bleak, now that I look at it closer. Not even that warm.” The slightly unreliable thermometer/barometer combination attached to the side of the drone reported it was in the mid fifties, which wasn’t much warmer than Chester’s compound in Nebraska.

“It’s better than vacuum,” Callum said. “And I don’t see any monsters. Nasty tidal scour though so maybe it’s not surprising nothing’s around.” Not that portal worlds seemed to need a true ecology. It was all mana fueled, or a consequence of the weirdness of the liminal physics that governed them.

“Well, go on,” Lucy said, nudging him with her elbow. “Get another drone in there so we can go exploring. It’s a whole different world! One that isn’t scary!”

Callum laughed and searched for a spare drone he could use to surveil the portal world, and pulled the one out of the west coast. He hadn’t really needed it, and he could always put it back later. Leaving the first drone by their test mice, he scooted over so Lucy could sit beside him and pilot the other one around.

From high up in the air, the tidal plain seemed to be endless, with no actual ocean or even a moon in sight to cause the water’s movement. It could have been a giant river, too, but something about it reminded Callum more of tidal estuaries and saltwater marshes. Maybe it was just the dearth of plant life.

Lucy steered the drone forward, the lightweight machine bobbling in the occasional gust of wind. There were no landmarks of note, just lots of the rock spurs poking twenty to fifty feet out of the sand wand water. In a way it all looked the same, but a few minutes later he was pretty sure it was actually identical.

“Fly down closer to that island there,” Callum said, pointing at the screen. Sure enough, as the drone got closer, they could make out the mouse cage and the other drone resting on the bare rock. It seemed like the space wrapped around itself, and if it was the same in every direction the whole thing was probably no more than twenty or thirty square miles.

“That is a heck of a thing,” Lucy said, laughing. “It’s tiny! Itty bitty pocket world.”

“Yeah, it’s kinda weird,” Callum agreed, shaking his head at the screen. It implied there were maybe hundreds or thousands of such pocket dimensions, but most of them would probably be worthless. Though he wouldn’t mind a ten square mile pocket world if it was nicer than a desolate tidal plain.

“Any enchanting materials though? I guess they wouldn’t be bane material since there’s nothing really here.” They still had a drone in the Night Lands to collect mordite since that was the easiest enchanting material to get, especially with Callum’s abilities, but a more reliable and private source would be a gold mine.

“Don’t know yet, I’ll have to—” Callum cut off as another mage bubble appeared in the range of his perceptions, accompanied by a fae. Not inside the little cabin they were staying at, but at the teleportation area that Chester had set up for the American Alliance. It was an archmage, which demonstrated to Callum why it wasn’t good to have an unsecured teleport inside secure territory. That archmage was probably Hargrave or Taisen, but someone else could wreak all kinds of havoc.

“What is it?” Lucy asked, tensing and reaching out to grip his arm.

“Archmage visit with fae companion,” Callum replied, wrapping a teleportation framework around himself, Lucy and Alex, his son being absorbed in some toy cars off to one side. “I doubt it’s just social.”

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“Not like there isn’t enough going on,” Lucy muttered, maneuvering the drone to land again in a sheltered spit of stone.

“Yeah.” Callum stood, reaching over to close the laptop. It wasn’t like what he was doing was secret, but he wasn’t quite prepared to tip his hand that he had a pocket dimension ready to go. Even if it wasn’t viable for habitation, it’d make a good source for feeder portals. “Might as well go see what the crisis is.”

“Look on the bright side,” Lucy said, going over to Alex. “It might not be a crisis.”

“It might not,” Callum admitted, but he didn’t believe it.

“Come on sweetie, we have to go check with Uncle Chester. We’ll be back in a little bit.” Alexander picked up his car and held his hands out, and Lucy scooped him up.

“Sorry I’ve been so busy, Alex,” Callum told his son. “We’ll play some games tonight after dinner.”

“Gravity tag!” Alex demanded instantly, and Callum ruffled his hair.

“Sure, kiddo, sounds good to me!” Normally it wasn’t too difficult to catch a two-year-old when playing tag. When that two-year-old could and did literally bounce off the walls, and ceiling, it was a lot more athletic proposition.

They shrugged on their coats to make the short trudge between buildings. While Callum could have teleported or portaled them easily enough, it was a pretty rude thing to do in someone else’s house. Besides which, he didn’t want to pop in on an archmage unannounced in case said archmage was twitchy. Callum still hadn’t cracked any kind of useful shield.

By the time that they reached the main mini-mansion in the compound, Chester and Lisa were in the front room with the archmage. Callum had a moment of uncertainty, thinking maybe it was presumptuous to think that his presence was necessary, but the shifter hanging out in the front room waved them onward. Sometimes it was weird interacting with people whose senses were good enough that they were functionally better than his spatial perceptions.

“Thanks, Gregory!” Lucy said, and Alex waved at the guard. Somehow even his son seemed to know more shifters than Callum did.

When they entered the sitting room that was the default meeting area, Callum was somewhat relieved to see the archmage in question was Taisen. He wasn’t sure he actually liked the man, but Taisen was a straight shooter and someone Callum could respect. It was far easier to deal with someone who was all business than political creatures. The fae accompanying him was another matter, and after a few moments of staring, Callum finally placed her.