The details of what happened when Midnight and I were apart were usually shared only as a summary. Key information about magic or enemies, plus whatever we felt like talking about. Only rare instances deserved a play-by-play.

  This story only came to me after Midnight returned from Earth #2, but because of what happened I really needed the full details from him. So I got the detailed account, play by play.

  The portal to Earth #1 closed, leaving Midnight and Captain Punch on the other side of a pile of cars.

  “Hey-” Captain Punch’s words were punctuated by his movements, “could- you-” He continued to annihilate The Scouring as they crawled out of the series of nearby portals. “Chase- down- civilians- who- ran too far?”

  “I don’t have any sound amplification abilities,” Midnight said. “And they’ll have gone in different directions.”

  “Fair- enough.” Captain Punch grabbed a spiky fellow and bowled him into a line of his fellows, pushing the encroaching horde back through the portal. He paused for a moment, took a deep breath, then yelled. “Hey! Citizens of New Bay! I told you to run but don’t go too far!”

  Then he tore some sort of lizard in half.

  “It’s a good thing that The Scouring turn into nothing when they die,” Midnight commented, looking at me. “Otherwise it would have been pretty gruesome.”

  “Same with Strife,” I said. “There would be blood everywhere from those quills.”

  “Anyway, I tossed a few cheaper spells, aware I would need to conserve my mana for the Gate back, maybe some Scrying… things like that. And then…”

  Burning arrows fell from the sky. “Phoenix Rain!” a voice shouted as the arrows turned into burning walls of intense flame, blocking off the portals.

  Captain Punch took advantage of the opportunity to shove a seven-horned bull into the open portal in front of him, holding it there with one hand as it tried to gore him, its hooves tearing up the ground.

  “I hope your repair crew is good, kid!” he commented as Burning Cupid landed. “Because I declare any damage caused here as permissible under the Interdimensional Emergency Act of 1915.”

  “There’s one of those?” I asked. “Why doesn’t Great Girl use that one?”

  “I think he made that up,” Midnight said. “Now could you stop interrupting?”

  “Sorry.”

  Burning Cupid landed in front of him as she leapt from a nearby building, flames swirling around her as Caroline- the phoenix- circled overhead. “I don’t… speak… English.”

  “Bleh. Where’s Calculator when you need him? Or Swiss Arms, or Lady Light, or…”

  “I speak English.” Pink Angel arrived, bringing along with her excessive amounts of the color pink as well as her Humurun companion, also Pink. She looked over Captain Punch. “A real life American superhero, huh? Where’s Mage?”

  “He had to go, closing the portal that… used to be behind those cars,” Captain Punch gestured. “I heard you can fix stuff?”

  “... it will be a bit difficult with them piled on each other.”

  “Oh, I can unstack them now,” Captain Punch said. “But about these portals…” he was still holding the ‘bull’ with one hand.

  “They should close soon. Are you… do you need help with that?”

  “Nah, it’s fine. This guy’s getting tired.”

  Midnight interrupted with some commentary. “At that point, they started talking about more complex issues, and I cast Translate on Captain Punch. Since that was the easiest thing. We talked about finding the New Bay citizens- there were a good number just hanging around- and the magical girls commented that they would put the word out to try to get random English speaking strangers. The portals closed, monsters were hunted, and people began cleaning up. That’s when the ninjas showed up.”

  Midnight was just minding his own business when suddenly, something magical was coming at him at high speed. He leapt to the side, his suit augmenting his movements even from a bad position. A shuriken impacted his Force Armor, suddenly negating it.

  Then there were several more all at once. More than he could hope to dodge, from many different angles. Midnight dashed for some sort of cover, taking several direct hits. With his Force Armor gone, his combat suit had to take the blows. Fortunately, it held.

  Midnight tried to sense where his foes were, but whatever magical traces they had were hidden well enough to stay unnoticed. With some cover, he had fewer angles for attacks to come from- but that didn’t seem to stop them, as he saw flying shuriken curve through the air. Then they bounced off of something solid.

  “Hey, ninjas, what do you have against my buddy here?” Captain Punch looked over his shoulder towards Midnight. “Would I be causing some sort of interdimensional incident if I cracked some ninja skulls?”

  “Umm… I’m pretty sure they’re not from this reality.”

  “Good enough.” He bent down in the middle of the street and scooped it up. Part of the street, specifically. When the ninjas launched another round of attacks, he chucked asphalt at surrounding buildings. Some chunks hit the buildings themselves, but there were a few cries of pain.

  Midnight vaguely heard a complaint, translated for his ears. “... can’t hurt him?”

  “Powers… be negated. Resistant, somehow.”

  Captain Punch scooped up Midnight in the crook of his arm, blocking every incoming attack.

  Midnight paused there. I could feel his unease. “Captain Punch… jumps really high.”

  I gave him a good pat on the head. “It’s okay. You’re here now.”

  Back to the story… Strife joined in on the action. “You guys again? How dare you!”

  Lady Eglantine dashed around the battlefield, providing rainbow light that revealed ninja after ninja. Captain Punch began grabbing some and tossing them into a pile, while Strife hit some of them with ‘small’ quills, specifically targeting their legs and hands so they couldn’t run or attack properly.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Even so, the ninjas kept coming for Captain Punch- which made no sense. Until several moved in at once, hands free. Midnight felt one of them touch him. That first ninja got shocked.

  “Relatedly, I’ve gotten pretty good at only shocking what I want to,” Midnight bragged. “Not just whatever I touch.”

  “That’s great,” I agreed. Shocking Grasp was one of his best spells to go with his agility.

  “I lasered the second one. The third one got a hand on me. Until his wrist was crushed. It doesn’t really make sense.”

  I frowned. “Well, we did make enemies with them in the past. I’m assuming those were the underground elves?”

  “Yeah. But they weren’t really trying to kill me.”

  “The shuriken?”

  Midnight shook his head. “They couldn’t have expected that to be enough. They wanted to weaken me before going in.”

  “We’ve got to thank Captain Punch for keeping you safe,” I said. “Sounds like an awful situation.”

  “I’d usually never say I preferred people trying to kill me, but…” Midnight tilted his head. “I really dislike the idea of them trying to snatch me. Same with Flash Circuit. I don’t want to be a hostage.”

  “You’re too strong to be a good hostage.”

  “Unless they can get power negators on me. Then I’m just a cat.”

  “Except for your suit, right?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  I pondered for a few moments. “I don’t know of a specific way to stop people from using magic. But it probably exists. Like the antimagic weapons they already have but not so… expendable.” I made a face. “It’s weird though. Not just that they were trying but that they were there at all. Are they working with Doctor Doomsday? Flash Circuit? Is everyone in a big conspiracy?”

  Oh, right. The incident. Midnight had gotten all of the people who came through the portal back- he checked with Scrying for people from Earth #1. He’d actually cast Gate himself to get back. He’d been technically able to cast it since he hit level 27. That incident had pushed him over level 28 which meant he wasn’t hitting the very edge of his fatigue threshold, which was a much more comfortable position to be in.

  So everything was resolved, for the moment. But back to worrying about conspiracies.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Midnight admitted. “It would have been pretty hard to predict that we were going to appear there. You’d need to be able to see the future.”

  I frowned so hard my tusks nearly broke skin. “You know, there is someone like that, somewhere in that world. Or at least she was.”

  “Do you think she joined the bad guys?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Helping Izzy once doesn’t mean much. Especially not if Master Uvithar is actually in hiding from her instead of with her. Or… separately from her, but as part of their own conspiracy thing.”

  “There’s one issue there. We have Nondetection on most of the time. Wouldn’t that make it hard to predict our future?”

  “I wish I knew,” I admitted. “But we do know she’s strong enough to break it.”

  “Sure, but mine hasn’t been messed with today. It’s still fully- Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “It’s actually gone.”

  “Now we need to find her even more. If only we could figure out how.”

  Maybe it just involved throwing ourselves at it more wholeheartedly. We could gain an upgrade or two in Advanced Divination Magic- heck, we could even buy those right now. Between the two of us, maybe we could wear her down and finally reveal her. Or maybe there was some technique we could learn officially. My formal education had been mostly early stuff and self-study, since I hadn’t been able to actually get most spells.

  “I guess we’ll figure that out later,” Midnight said. “What about what happened here?”

  “Oh, that? Well, you know. Standard stuff.”

  -----

  Castle carried me atop the buildings, leap after leap, heading towards another portal. There were already monsters falling out of the sky. “Why is there a portal there?” I commented.

  Castle explained helpfully. “That’s one of his stated locations. Well, not quite. It’s next to the tower mentioned. We’re not sure if it’s a mistake or part of the plan. There’s more chaos with things being dumped on the city instead of just on the roof of the tower. That was one of the few places we managed to fortify.”

  As we got closer, I realized they weren’t really monsters. Or at least, that wasn’t the most correct description. “Ooh, robots!” I said. “But why don’t they feel- hmm. They might just be advanced tech.”

  “What should they feel like?” Castle asked. “And what’s the difference?”

  “Well, if it was super tech they’d feel like powers. And they just don’t. Advanced tech just works. If we had the intermediate knowledge required to construct things, we could just replicate it here. And by we I mean someone else, I don’t have time to get into that stuff. Learning about magic is already keeping me very busy.”

  “Does it make them tougher to fight?”

  “For you? Probably not. As for me, I guess it depends on if they expected to be hit by lightning.”

  “Surely they’d be insulated.”

  “Yeah, but most lightning isn’t trying to kill you. It’s usually a coincidence.”

  Midnight interrupted. “Where do you think the robots came from? Why would they just be sitting, waiting to attack?”

  “That’s still being looked into,” I shrugged. “Anyway, they weren’t really in any recognizable forms.”

  The robots were like monsters in that they didn’t fit to any recognizable form. At best, they had vaguely familiar limb structures. Many of them could fly- or at least glide. Others caught onto the nearby buildings as high as possible, climbing claws dragging gouges into the sides. And still others just… hit the ground. Surprisingly few of those became inoperable even after leaving the ground full of craters.

  Castle stopped. “I can’t leap high enough to get onto that roof. We might be able to climb up the back side.”

  I looked at the situation and took stock of my mana. “I can get up there. You can be really light, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do that.” I cast Fly on myself. The situation wasn’t so urgent that teleporting with Dimension Door was worth the extra mana, not when I could have an ability that would last for a while for cheaper. Then I picked up Castle much the same way she’d been carrying me. “Aww man I missed an even cheaper option.”

  “... Cheaper?” she asked.

  “Eh… I can tell you if we ever join up for power training. Otherwise I’m gonna have to say the details are a Brigade Secret.”

  But if she could make us both extremely light, with enough versatility in control that she could bypass the issues of air friction, I could probably have just picked us up with Mage’s Reach. Normal physics wouldn’t let that work, but I didn’t get counterforce on my actual body so it probably would have worked.

  Fly was good, though, as I carried Castle up to the roof, only for her to jump into the portal. “I can’t close it with you in there!” I called after her, flying closer. “Well, I mean, I could…”

  “You can shrink it a little at a time, right?” she asked as she held her arms in front of her face, blocking shots from a gatling gun of some sort. She sure had confidence in herself to fight actual advanced tech like that. “This portal is way too wide and too many things are coming out. I’ll stem the tide, until you get it smaller.”

  “That actually makes sense,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

  If I trapped her on the other side, I could probably figure out how to make a Gate at some point.