The conversation with Cerebaton weighed on my thoughts even after the big man left. I ended up staying up late while producing more of the silver and pearl earrings turning the information over in my head.

  I had previously thought that Cerebaton was the head of the branch, and thus didn’t have any superiors at the DSR that could order him around. From the way that Cariad had always talked about him with such respect, that was the impression I’d gotten at least.

  Learning that his superiors were not only aware of me, but some of them were also maneuvering in an attempt to use me was not a welcome thought. I needed to put myself in a stronger bargaining position if something like that happened, and Cerebaton had given me the idea of aiding the DSR under contracts rather than being used.

  The first step was ensuring that I wasn’t in a vulnerable position on Earth. It might be a place that I only visited on occasion, but there were people here that I cared about and it was my plane of origin. Until I could figure out how to change that—and if I wanted to change it—I needed to focus on building myself a strong base to operate from.

  In order to do that, I needed a better place to stay. Negotiating from my shitty living room with the threadbare couch and the damage to the walls wasn’t going to fly. It certainly didn’t give me the impression of a position of power, or even stability. So a new place to stay was paramount.

  Rather than touring apartments, I instead decided to do something that some might think was insane.

  I went off grid.

  “The property itself is prime land, though undeveloped. There are power lines that run near the property, so it won’t be too hard to get electrical hooked up if that is what you want. The issue is mostly water. This high up, you are going to have to drill out a well and it’ll have to go pretty deep.”

  Arranging a meeting with a realtor who handled land was surprisingly easy. Jameson put me in contact with the bull-necked man who was walking me through the pine-needle covered patch of land that I was looking at.

  “I assume that is why the land is so cheap?” I asked, stepping around the gnarled bole of a twisted pine tree. Despite the fact that the tree hung at an angle, its roots still clung tenaciously to the rocky soil while bright green needles decorated the trunk.

  “Partially, yes. The other part is that this is pretty remote. It’ll be a pain to get the sort of construction equipment up here that is gonna be needed. You saw the road.” Gordon said with a wave of his hand over one shoulder back to where our trucks were parked.

  “That I did,” I said with a grin. It was true too, the road would have been brutal for the sort of little car that most people in town drove. But my old pickup took it without issues.

  We were north of Denver, tucked into the foothills of the mountains where there was more rock and clay than soil, and that made the land even harder to sell. The road that we’d taken to get in twisted and wandered for nearly twenty minutes until it hit the boundary markers for the little plot of land.

  Though it’s only little on paper. Twenty acres is quite a bit of land when you think about it, I thought with a grin as I stared at the hillside with my hands on my hips.

  The other reason that the property was so cheap didn’t need to be mentioned aloud. It was basically a patch of hillside that sat at around a twenty degree angle for most of its entire expanse. Where there weren’t trees, there were outcroppings of stone and boulders. If anyone wanted to develop the land, they’d need to flatten it out and build massive retaining walls to hold the soil at bay.

  “You mentioned a well, does that mean that the land grant still holds its water and mineral rights?” I asked, remembering the important questions that Jameson had drilled into me.

  He had suggested Gordon to me because the man was someone he worked with regularly with his architecture work, but this still was a potential business contract.

  “Water and minerals, yes. This area hasn’t seen any mineral claims, those normally center around the rivers. That was a note on the paperwork. It’s a quiet spot and would make for a wonderful backwoods cabin too,” Gordan said with an earnest smile.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact I was learning more and more how to read people and building my perception up, I would have missed the sly twinkle in the man’s eye as he watched me. He knew that I was interested, and the expected pitch would be coming soon. But first, he would need to talk me around some, I was sure.

  “The remoteness is an issue, and you’ll need to arrange a septic setup. The sale is for the land as-is, though. Groundwater testing and the like was done recently, so no issues using this for residential occupancy. If you are looking for a place that lets you get away from it all, you can’t go wrong with this one.”

  “That I am. I probably won’t bother with getting power run out to the place, just need to set up some solar panels to run the necessities,” I said, tucking my hands into my pockets as I wandered over the rocky earth.

  Gordon kept up with me despite his thick build. While he looked like the kind of man who was more comfortable sitting behind a desk for long hours rather than working in manual labor, he didn’t huff and puff while climbing the rough earth, so that was a plus in my book.

  “Solar is a good option, just gotta be careful of the hail that we get. But you know about that, being a local,” Gordon explained as I led him further out onto the property. “The cost of the land is just the first part of it. I hope you know that it is going to be a fair bit of time before you could feasibly live out here.”

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  “Not a problem,” I said with a wave of my hand. “I plan on doing a lot of the work myself, so I expect it to take a bit.”

  What I didn’t explain to Gordon was the fact that the bulk of my work, as well as the construction, would be underground. Out of sight of people and with a power that he had no idea existed.

  While Gordon prattled on, warning me about the sheer scale of the project I was talking about and his concerns regarding overconfidence, I let my Manipulate Element power sink into the earth beneath me.

  Just as it had when I was shaping the ground for the girls on Cortha, I could feel the individual grains of soil, stones both large and small, as well as the coiling masses of the tree roots. It would be harder and take longer than when I’d burrowed into the hillside to find the ruins only two weeks ago, but this was doable.

  And then I can build an underground home. Issues like groundwater, seepage, insulation, construction, and all of that can be remedied with magic. I have the internet at my fingertips and there are plenty of sites about sustainable living. I don’t need to use power tools when the earth moves at my touch and I could pick my truck up and carry it myself.

  While his concerns were not ones that I shared, the fact that Gordon was taking the time to voice them alone told me that the man was honest. That or he was desperate, since this parcel of land had been sitting unsold for quite a bit of time. The land was cheap because the costs for a normal person to develop it was easily four or five times what they would be for a plot of land closer to Denver.

  The only real downside is going to be getting back into town will take some effort, I thought to myself. I can shop for longer periods, and transport delicate things inside my Dimensional Pocket ability. But if I have to make a trip into town to deliver shipments to the post office, then it won’t be too bad to pick up necessities.

  I’d toyed with the idea originally just as an option to cut my costs. Sure, it would take more cash up front to get things comfortable, but if I’d been fired I would have been able to survive like this. Now, with the side business tearing along, I could afford this far better.

  The idea of using my Traveler powers to shape myself a home was actually kind of intoxicating. And being this far from the city, I could use that power I’d unlocked to bring the girls to visit. There were many possibilities that this would bring, and not the least of which was the fact that the land came with mineral claim rights.

  If I worked it properly, I could claim that I found a mineral vein on the land, and that would handle my costs going forward. Sure, I’d still keep making jewelry with the gold I could pull out of the local rivers and streams, but this would give me a way to legitimize it in the eyes of the government. I knew it would only be a matter of time before the amount of money my little Bitsy store was making would get someone’s attention.

  Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath of the pine-scented air. It was getting to be late in the year, and the ground would be freezing soon. But Colorado was nothing if not unpredictable in what the weather would do, and we’d gotten lucky to have a warm day this close to the snowy season.

  “—weather permitting, of course. Since you mentioned it was going to be a lot of personal work, then it might be good to see if you can get a shipping container up here on a flatbed. That’ll let you store the supplies through the winter, without having to haul things up and down the mountain,” Gordon was saying when I tuned back in to him.

  “Not a bad thought,” I agreed, already plotting out in my head where I’d set up the bulk of my new home on the lot.

  The twenty acres wasn’t a perfect square, really it was more of a rectangle, but that was fine. I’d done a bit of looking on the online maps, and this hillside would be perfect for me. It got a good view of the sky to let me set up a satellite internet connection, and the solar panels could be set up near a dummy shack as well. Having the panels then routing power into storage cells would give me power for everything I needed. Again, it would cost more up front, but after the shitty apartment I was in right now, the idea of roughing it a bit wasn’t that bad.

  And if you talk to the girls, you might be able to find some enchanted items on Cortha that will stand in place of shit like a water heater, I thought with a grin, remembering the public bath where Kassandra, Rieka, and I had gone after a rough hunting trip.

  The pressure I could feel in my chest was more than just excitement as well. I’d been gauging it ever since we’d arrived and I’d gotten out of my truck. Cerebaton had said before that the mana concentration on Earth was higher than on Cortha, but out here amongst the trees and the rocks? I could almost taste the earth mana in the air.

  To test it out, I used Manipulate Element to soften the stone under my left boot and gave it a testing push. The solid stone squished like clay and smeared easily between my magic and the unnatural strength my stats gave me. With my eyes closed, I watched as the four mana that the brief expression of power had cost me surged back into my inner reservoir in less than ten seconds.

  “Okay Gordon,” I said, cutting off the man’s continued pitch—this time about the clean air and bright sunlight. “Let’s talk about the cost. I know the posting online said that this plot was up for sale at forty-five thousand, but I can go to the bank and get a cashier’s check today. Do you think your client will take thirty-five?”

  “The forty-five is already ten under what they wanted. I guarantee that you won’t find land at that price. How about forty-two grand?” Gordon countered with a thoughtful look.

  The ease with which he negotiated told me that Gordon had been given a range by the land owner, and that they clearly wanted it sold.

  “It’s going in to winter now, I won’t be able to even really get started on much of anything for months. I can do forty as that’ll give me time to get some more cash together for setting things up, but that’s the most I can do,” I replied, setting my hands on my hips and staring at the ground in front of me in thought.

  It would actually wipe me out almost entirely. My savings had been slowly flourishing with the extra income from the Bitsy sales, and I had about forty-seven thousand in the bank right now. I knew it’d cost me a few more grand in paperwork and fees for the sale, but as long as the silver earrings I’d been making sold at a reasonable rate, then I’d be just fine.

  “I can bring it to the landowner,” Gordon said after a moment of thought. “I think they’ll accept the forty, but I make no promises. Mind if I make a phone call?” He added the last part while fishing one of those folding smart-phones out of his pocket with a meaty hand.

  “Be my guest,” I said, giving him my best winning smile. The smirk on his face told me that this was as good as done now, it was just a matter of the paperwork.

  Manipulate Element to form a home for a while. It's been forming for a while but with Liam working to expand his mind, the ideas are finally clicking together.

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