Lillene

Happy Halloween / All Hallows' Eve!

Serenity and Russ were eating breakfast when the world shook. Serenity could hear Gaia’s jubilation, so he immediately knew what had happened: Earth had advanced to Tier Four. That was insanely fast; worlds were supposed to be slower than people, not faster!

Russ seemed confused, so Serenity told him what he’d sensed. Russ’s reaction was far more muted than Serenity’s. “It seems gentler than last time. I hope I’m right about that.”

“Gentler?” Serenity wasn’t certain what Russ meant, but he also knew he wasn’t on Earth when the planet advanced to Tier Three. “Did something happen during the last Tier increase?”

“Worldwide earthquakes.” Russ closed his eyes and shook his head. “They didn’t last long, but they caused a lot of damage. I hope there wasn’t anything like that this time.”

Serenity couldn’t remember if that was normal or not. He certainly didn’t remember from his initial time on Earth; he’d probably never known anyway. Everything fell apart because of the invasions and the damage they resulted in, some from the invaders and some self-inflicted. It was only in retrospect that Serenity could even identify that Earth had probably made it to Tier Three. 

No, the part he thought he should know but didn’t was what happened on other planets when the Tier increased. He knew it happened; he was even fairly confident that he’d been there when it happened more than once. He didn’t remember any damage of the type Russ talked about; sure, the world shook, but he didn’t remember much destruction. The part that bothered him was that he couldn’t be certain if that was because there wasn’t any destruction or if there was and he just didn’t notice.

Well, there was an easy way to check. Some time while he was gone, Aki had added the connection for fiber-optic Internet service. Serenity wasn’t certain how she was paying for it, but he didn’t care enough to ask. The important thing was that she’d also added a wireless router that serviced his house, so he could easily check and see if there were any earthquakes big enough to hit the news yet.

“I’m not finding any reports yet, but it could be a few minutes,” Serenity reported. 

Russ nodded, pulled out his phone, and set it next to his plate. “I’ll check again after we finish eating. There’s not much I can do immediately anyway.”

Serenity nodded and went back to his food. He only managed a couple more bites before he just wasn’t interested anymore. He hadn’t been that hungry to begin with, since he was in a dungeon, and the conflict between his joy at Gaia’s growth and the possibility of catastrophe ruined the rest of his appetite.

Russ kept trying for a few more bites, but he also didn’t seem nearly as interested in his meal as before.

When he finally gave up and took his dishes into the kitchen, Serenity happily followed him. They both set their dirty dishes on the reclamation table, which was, in Serenity’s opinion at least, one of the biggest benefits of living in a dungeon. All of the trash cans were self-emptying, the floor didn’t collect dirt, and dishes never needed to be cleaned; the dirty dishes simply disappeared when no one was in the house, only to reappear in the cabinet. 

Aki was totally willing to cheat and Serenity was right there with her. The only way to make permanent changes to the house, including bringing things in, was with Aki’s help. That had its downsides, but overall it was a huge benefit.

Back out in the front room, Serenity wished he had the sort of projection technology a lot of movies showed off, where you could project something in front of you and move it around with your hands. It was possible with magical illusions, but Serenity couldn’t do it. 

It was also possible with the right sort of AR goggles and programs, which was the closest Serenity could get. Serenity didn’t need the goggles himself, but he did need the set for his future father-in-law, which was on the Aide could manage the data for something like the map, but he’d already warned it would be slow; apparently this wasn’t what he’d optimized Serenity’s hardware for, so he was borrowing computing power from somewhere else. 

Aide hadn’t specified where and Serenity hadn’t asked, but his best guess was that it was Tek’s. The AR goggles he’d ordered for Russ and Rissa were definitely from Tek; no one else would make steampunk aviator style AR glasses. Even without the styling, though, they had to be from Tek. No one else would be able to deliver on an order within an hour of it being placed. Even more tellingly, they were delivered to his house in the dungeon, not to his post office box.

Russ didn’t pay any attention to the goggles on the table when he followed Serenity into the room; instead, his attention was on his phone. “Good news, it looks like there wasn’t much damage. It seems to have been a worldwide earthquake, but it didn’t get above a 2 on the Richter scale anywhere. That’s what all the talking heads are saying, at least, along with the commentary that everyone felt it and no one should have. There’s some argument that maybe some people should have, but even people who definitely shouldn’t have noticed did.”

Serenity nodded; that made sense. The planet increasing in Tier wouldn’t just move the physical world; it would also affect the mana and the planet’s own aura. Planetary auras were generally static, so most people just ignored them, but it only made sense that Earth’s would move when it Tiered up.

Russ tucked his phone in his pocket, then noticed the goggles sitting on top of the maps he’d left out the day before. “I take it I’m supposed to put one of these on?”

“Yeah. I wanted to give you a chance to see the additions I’ve made; maybe it’ll help you see a pattern.” Serenity took a seat on the couch and let Aide bring up the image. He watched Russ snag a pair of goggles before taking his own seat.

The map was three dimensional, technically, but everything that wasn’t the surface of the planet was a gray blur. Aide hadn’t included anything below ground; Serenity figured they could add that if it looked important, but the odds were that it wouldn’t be. The initial display had all of the information, which was far too cluttered. The fact that he could zoom in or out as necessary helped a lot, but he still didn’t see anything immediately.

“Show me only where the Solomon vases were found,” Russ asked. Serenity’s display didn’t change, but he knew that Russ’s would have; Aide was listening. 

If Russ was going to start with the vases, Serenity would start from the other side: with the land purchases. Serenity didn’t even have to say anything out loud for the display to change.

There was something oddly familiar about the layout, but Serenity couldn’t put his finger on it; it was simply too blurry. Wait, blurry … was that exactly the problem? What if the entire property being bought didn’t matter? What if the ones where two next to each other were being bid on was because either would work? “Turn the continuous bits into points, centered at the middle.” He was just thinking out loud, but it was something to try.

The result was even more familiar even though it looked like a haze of points. Serenity looked at it one way, then another, then another over the next couple of hours. It wasn’t until he had Aide block out all of the points farther from the center than a predefined distance and had him vary what that distance was that it jumped out at him: there was an entire group of points that disappeared together. A circle.

Serenity repeated the exercise at different distances and found that there wasn’t just one circle; there were four. There were also some individual points that didn’t seem to belong to the circles, but Serenity disregarded them for now; they might be important or they might be completely unrelated. Four concentric circles didn’t mean anything offhand, but Serenity had Aide connect them temporarily and play with the weight of the lines drawing the circles, hoping something would jump out at him.

When it did, Serenity wanted to facepalm. It was obvious; he wasn’t looking at four circles. He was looking at two circles overlaid on an eight-pointed star. At least, he thought it was an eight-pointed star; some of the points were missing, two from the outer “circle” and three from the inner shape, but nothing else made sense. He could even figure out where those five points ought to be; if he assumed those points, everything turned into a shape that he recognized as one of the more advanced “ritual circles,” even though it wasn’t just a circle.

The points of the star all extended past the outer circle; that was what he’d mistaken for a circle beyond the true outer circle. It explained the low number of points for that “circle”. The innermost “circle” had the same eight points; it defined not points but where the star’s lines would cross as they came down from the points. Alternatively, they defined the eight-sided figure that sat inside the star.

Which way you looked at that part of the figure was important to how a ritual that used it would work in certain formulations of ritual work. Serenity didn’t entirely agree with them, but he accepted it as a way that those particular practitioners used to guide themselves in creating the correct Intent for the ritual to work. That sort of thinking was particularly common in group rituals, where everyone’s Intent had to cooperate for the ritual to work correctly.

Serenity couldn’t figure out why it was laid out the way it was until he added the ley lines in. The ley line map was seriously incomplete and derived from the known dungeon locations, but it was still better than nothing and it almost immediately gave him a very large clue: three ley lines that he knew were there because he’d mapped them himself ran exactly along the lines of the giant ritual.

That wasn’t a good thing. Ley lines wouldn’t naturally follow a ritual; they were at least somewhat random. This meant someone either knew how to move them or had mapped enough ley lines to find something that fit, then built the ritual around it. The first option seemed both more concerning and more likely. Serenity already knew that Earth’s ley line network was shattered; he’d simply assumed it happened because the World Core was damaged twice. 

What if the ley lines were splintered for a different reason?

Worse, what if the second round of damage to Earth’s World Core was because the ley lines were moved and broken? Gaia remembered it as happening during a War of the Gods; from everything Serenity had put together, he thought that war happened a few decades after the sinking of A’Atla. Unfortunately, he might not be correct; he was basing everything on the millennia-old memories of a deity and a World Core that didn’t track time the way mortals did.

He’d probably never know the whole story.

What he did know was that he needed to map the rest of the ley lines in the area, or at least the area that he thought was covered by the ritual. If they matched up with the figure, he’d know he was onto something for certain, but he still wasn’t certain exactly what. It was something powerful, definitely, but just the shape didn’t tell him what the ritualist planned to use all the power for.

Lillene