Epilogue

Alexander channeled his vis through the Jumper, and watched the new portal form through the camera feed.

“Every time I see a new world, it just makes me think how weird it is your dad doesn’t care about exploring,” Jennifer said, as a massive crystalline spire appeared through the opening, specks circling around it and glinting in the sunlight. If he had to guess, Alexander would say there was an actual civilization there. It wouldn’t be the first one, but very few liminal spaces had people.

“It is a bit of a shame,” Alexander said to his wife. “He’s practically the perfect explorer, but I guess if he did we wouldn’t be able to. We should be glad he’s the most boring archmage.” Despite his words, his voice was fond. Callum really was rather staid, even moreso than some archmages centuries older than him, but he’d pioneered half the enchantments the Jumper used and had supported Alex’s desire to explore.

“No, this is a lot of fun.” Jennifer’s hand hovered over the button that would send them through the portal. “Are we ready?”

“Looks like,” Alex said, glancing over the sensor readouts. The foci that created the inch-diameter dimensional portals were located in their own sealed chamber, chock full of both technological and magical sensors. More than once the destination on the far side had been unlivable, or even outright hostile. When it came to portal worlds, a hostile landscape could be far more literal than the term normally implied.

Jennifer hit the button, and the Jumper was wrapped in a teleportation matrix, a small thread going through the portal to unfold on the other side and shift the Jumper through. The vehicle was the size of a van on the outside, but was effectively far larger thanks to the spatial connection back to Earth’s moon. Most of that size was given over to armor and enchantments to make sure it could safely traverse all the environments they might find.

There was a spatial stabilization enchantment woven through the whole thing, to allow them to cross into the odder portal worlds, like Mictlān, while keeping the gravity the same as Earth’s. A separate enchantment allowed the Jumper to float and even fly, if not at the speeds of his father’s drones. The matte metal craft hovered over the exotic grasses of the alien world, and a brilliant sun shone in through the protective glass.

Alex sent out a vis pulse, amplified by the skin of the ship, using his own particular aspects to appraise the surroundings beyond what he could see. Gravity was straightforward enough, and he could tell that the portal world had something close to normal. There were enough mana anomalies within the closest few miles that he was pretty sure someone or something was doing a lot of magical manipulation, however.

His other aspect was more complicated. It wasn’t just light, it was electromagnetism. Electric and magnetic fields and charges. His mother had been fit to be tied over what that meant for his ability to compromise electronics, but mostly it was useful for spotting technology. Or even magitech. Civilization produced far different types and concentrations of energy than nature did, even if that civilization was strange by human standards.

Alex’s initial impression was proven right as the vis pulse picked up what felt like electrons moving through crystal in a set of parallel lines sweeping a half-mile under the ground. More complex energy patterns flowed through crystalline hulls in the air ten miles above their heads, showing that it was based on technology as much as magic. That only made sense, since most magic didn’t act like what human mages could do, and reproduce most of what physics allowed.

“A crystal based tech, or magitech, maybe?” Alex hazarded, as the vis pulse faded.

“Ooh. That sounds like it could be fun,” Jennifer said, as she started sending out messages. The dragons were the de-facto ambassadors, the ones that actually made contact with other civilizations. Not only did they have more experience, their avatars were expendable enough that a worst-case scenario simply wasn’t. “That big tower is very pretty. If it’s all like that, this place is going to be gorgeous.”

“Maybe we can get some pieces for our estate,” Alex said, considering the unbroken shimmering expanse of the megastructure. He’d found his own liminal world for his own home, even though he could have built on one of the other islands in his parents’ dimension. Partly for the symbolic distance, since with teleports it wasn’t like anyone was all that far away, but mostly because he liked having four seasons and not just the one.

“So long as they’re friendly,” Jennifer sighed. “Though I can always do some charity work,” she said, volunteering the use of her own healing aspect. Between enchantments and his own abilities, Alex could deal with most problems, but actually fixing people required something special. That wasn’t why he’d married her, but it came in quite useful during their travels.

He flooded the travel enchantments with vis, sending the Jumper forward toward the spire. After several minutes they approached a town, but the spire hadn’t seemed to get any smaller. Alex had to revise his estimate of how damn big it was — and how big the things circling it were.

“Taisen is going to have a fit,” Jennifer said, looking up at it. “If they built that, they’re not going to be too impressed with earth’s tech. Or ours, for that matter.”

“Maybe,” Alex cautioned. “There might be something about their magic that lets them make really big stuff, but doesn’t help with anything else,” he said, watching something very much like a train slide into a station on shining rails. It was obvious from the clean lines of the town, all built from various shades of crystal, that there wasn’t muscle-powered squalor sprawling everywhere.

The glamour should keep the Jumper invisible, and he pulsed his vis a couple times to make sure there was nothing active searching for them, but Alex knew not to rely on magical concealment. It wouldn’t have worked on his dad, for example, and Callum had been clear enough how too many assumptions could be lethal. There was a reason the Jumper had several failsafes to teleport them to a secure location, just in case. Fortunately, Shahey wasn’t long.

The avatar he sent was clearly meant to impress, in formal dress with medals and ribbons, over-tall to the point of having to hunch over in the Jumper. His wings threatened to bump into handles and buttons, but they never quite did as he peered out through the window. Jennifer looked like she was trying to strangle a smile at the oddly graceful clumsiness and not quite succeeding.

“If nothing else they have style,” Shahey concluded. “Let me out here and I’ll see what they’re like. I’d like you to hang around for a bit in case it seems worth it to ask your father to open a permanent portal.”

“No problem,” Jennifer said, and toggled the airlock door for Shahey. They watched his winged form swoop down toward the outskirts of town before it vanished. When they chose to use it, dragon invisibility was impressive. They could even fool Callum’s eyes, though not his other senses.

“What odds do you give?” Alex asked. One of the civilizations they’d found had been so early that writing hadn’t yet been discovered, and another had been so intensely xenophobic that the dragons had simply decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Neither species had been human-like either, but with all the jumping back and forth between regular universes and liminal spaces the Jumper had gotten quite far away from Earth in any direction that could be conceived.

“They have to be at least slightly friendly if they’ve built big,” Jennifer suggested. “Unless they’re ants, that means cooperation. But a portal world, I don’t know. There might not be a night sky and nothing to suggest there’s anything else in the universe.” Jennifer chewed her lip as she looked down at the town. “I’d like to hope they’re friendly, at least.”

“We can hope,” Alex agreed.

***

Alice trimmed her fruit trees with shears, physical and mundane instruments that she preferred to the foci other mages used. The few that gardened, anyway — most mages didn’t seem to have many hobbies that weren’t focused on their magic, which Alice thought was pretty stupid. Her parents certainly thought so, and they had made out pretty well.

A garden had absolutely nothing to do with her magic, though she did ply her specific talents to water the plants. Not to mention feeling out the hydration and nutrition, since she’d gone with internal reinforcement instead of a shell, and learned most of her craft from Uncle Huitzilin. At the time she hadn’t thought too much about it, but in hindsight it was obvious that she couldn’t have learned from House Harper, where she’d probably gotten the water aspect from in the first place.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

She stepped back and eyed her work, then reached out to adjust the enchantments she’d made to control the light of her home. Unlike her parents or her brother, she didn’t reside in the endless liminal spaces of the universe, but rather in the real world. Though admittedly, not on Earth.

There were still portals, of course, since the depths of space had no mana, but the habitat itself spun in the blackness all by itself, far away from any planet. It wasn’t even a supernatural effort as such, mostly using standard technology. The only real reliance was the gravity enchantment for very slow propulsion and the spatial gates for travel or shipping.

She felt a portal open in her house and turned to wander back inside. Even if she didn’t have the range of her dad, not quite yet, she could at least sense that much. It helped that she could detect the shape of the person who stepped through by the moisture they displaced. Since that particular portal led back to her parents’ house, she knew who it was right away.

“Hi, mom!” She said cheerfully, and enfolded the much smaller woman in a smothering hug. Some trick of genetics, or possibly something to do with the internal reinforcement, had made Alice tower over both her parents by a full head. Something she found endlessly amusing.

“Hi, sweetie,” Lucy said in a muffled voice, and waggled the pot Alice had pinned against Lucy’s side with her embrace. “Alex sent over another plant for you.”

“And you wanted an excuse to come out to the space station.”

“And I wanted an excuse to come out to the space station,” Lucy agreed happily as Alice let her go. “Callum still gets people complaining that you’re out here rather than doing whatever it is that mages are supposed to do.” She rolled her eyes as Alice took the pot. It looked ordinary enough, but there was a small portal in the bottom to let the plant’s native magic leak through, which was how they’d ended up dealing with plants from other realities.

“Can’t he just do his death stare thing at them?” Alice asked, examining the pot. The sapling inside had tiny crystalline leaves, like it was made out of quartz, but she could feel the sap running through it.