“Go on ahead, I’ll catch up.”

  The old goblin mage- Wrickle- commented as the others began to move on. Even I was beginning to move on, but Sir Kalman and Izzy weren’t budging. Maybe they wanted more snacks. But more likely they were picking up on something I wasn’t. And since I noticed that, I was basically the same as doing it myself.

  Sure, part of it was that Midnight was in my head, but surrounding yourself with the right people was a good choice and thus it counted for me.

  “Another scone?” the goblin offered as I wandered back towards the table.

  I wasn’t a glutton. But I did grab one to nibble. “So are we just supposed to wander out or what?” I asked. “Do they just trust us not to do anything stupid, or do they have drones watching us?” I didn’t actually know a word that would fit, but for once I was speaking my native language and thus had to make up my own translation. “... Flying homunculi.”

  “That would be a decent security measure,” Wrickle commented. “If anyone could be bothered to make them.”

  Either she was deflecting, or I had concerns. Then again, the Power Brigade had security specialists as well as power users- the Granbold Mage’s Tower was pretty much only made up of power users, if we looked at things from that angle. Probably, they got to a certain level of safety and thought things were enough.

  “So… did you need help getting to your destination?” I asked.

  The stool was pretty high. If she didn’t want to embarrass herself in front of the other mages, that was fine. But leaving an old lady stranded wasn’t my thing- even if I wasn’t going to get merit points from the Brigade for my services.

  “Oh no. An old lady like mere merely has to rest for longer.”

  Okay. But there were two other old folk that already shuffled off. I looked towards my companions for help.

  “While we wait…” Midnight came in with the assist. “Is there something else you’d like to chat about?”

  “Well, magic is always of interest,” she commented. “Have you read any good magical tomes lately?”

  “I don’t have many,” I admitted. “Mana Manipulation for Mages was… interesting.”

  The old woman smiled, her legs swinging atop her tall stool. “Zenfer would be disappointed to hear you thought it anything less than revolutionary. Even if it’s mostly just compounded from other information with little new to add to the discussion.”

  “So he did write it then? The author attribution of some of these is… difficult to pick out.”

  She nodded. “So many of us are hungry for fame that we forget little details like that. Or perhaps such details are erased by those with strong opinions about our selves… if not so strong that they reject our work. Ready anything good about dimensional magic?”

  I almost immediately responded, but then I remembered the suspicion we were dealing with here. Maybe this old woman was a snare laid at our feet. I wasn’t sure if Uvithar intended the particular delivery method of Portal Theory considering it arrived via Santa, but it had certainly been intended to reach me. Maybe he used fate magic or something.

  “I remember Master Uvithar had a book. Portal Theory.”

  “Which one?” she tilted her head.

  “Uh… which one what?”

  “Oh, there are a whole mess of tomes titled Portal Theory, you see,” Wrickle shrugged. Her shoulders almost sunk into her hat.

  “A Treatise on Gates as Well as all Manner of Natural and Artificial Portals ,” I repeated the name. If it was a secret that he’d possessed that tome, I would apologize after. But it shouldn’t lead them to him… probably.

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” Wrickle nodded. “But I wouldn’t recommend that to be the first of my works you read. Have you come across Dimensional Magic: From Storage to Spatial Rift?”

  “... No? What’s Spatial Rift?” Was that a horrible side effect of something, or a spell?

  “It’s like Gate, but without much behind it,” she explained helpfully.

  “But why would-” I frowned. Depending on how that worked, I could think of various applications. Mostly dangerous ones. The bigger problem, though, was that I didn’t think it was on the list of spells. “Is that one… on the list?”

  “Why don’t you check?” she said.

  I did. And there it was, at the 19th tier. There weren’t that many spells. I feel like I shouldn’t have been able to miss it. I narrowed my eyes at her. “It’s there.”

  “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s a spell.”

  “Give me a moment,” I said. I took out my phone. Why? Because I had written down a copy of the list for the Brigade so that they could plan around which spells existed and which did not compared to fiction. There were some things about which my memory was spotty. Like names. But not names of spells. And this time, I wasn’t wrong. “Can spells… be added to the list?”

  “What sort of list would it be if it were immutable?” she tilted her head.

  “Is this spell… recently discovered?”

  “Oh no. It’s just not very popular. Probably because of the side effects.”

  “What sort of side effects?”

  Wrickle waved her arm in a tossing gesture, and I suddenly saw a tome sailing through the air. With momentum. Was that a thing you could do when taking something out of Storage? Like the whole setup of tea- including snacks.

  Wrickle sort of answered my question as I stared at the tome in my hands. “You can find out if you read the book. Mostly unintentional mutilation. For some reason, nobody likes to keep my earlier books on the shelves. Maybe it’s the penmanship, what do you think?”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  “It seems fine?” I tilted my head. “Is this your writing, or a scribe’s?” Considering the amount of magic imbued into the ink, I felt like it was probably hers. “Why aren’t you an archmage?”

  “It’s not easy, you know,” Wrickle waved vaguely. “You can’t just become an archmage because you want to.”

  “Do they have strict requirements?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s mostly politics. That’s the reason for me, at least.”

  “... Why did you come with the other three?”

  She tilted her head and looked innocent. “What do you mean? Am I not qualified?”

  “You just… don’t seem like you’re with them,” I said.

  She smiled. “We were all here at the same time, weren’t we? And your plans ultimately hinge around dimensional magic. Unless Uvithar is hiding under someone’s couch.”

  I looked around. “Is there some reason to not be maximally straightforward here?”

  “Being cryptic is fun!” she declared. “Anyway… I have my own plots. One of which is making sure that a promising dimensional mage learns as much as he can.”

  I made a face. “I didn’t even want to be a dimensional mage. I sort of fell into it. I’d rather be a battlemage, given that I have Cu- Aspect of the Barbarian.”

  “Then you’ll love Spatial Rift. Just don’t use it in cities. Or near anything you care about, including yourself.”

  I looked at the tome. “How much detail does it go into?”

  “Enough. You should be careful with it though.”

  I couldn’t even buy it right now… though I’d certainly be reading up on it before I spent the points. It sounded like something problematic for Brigade work.

  Wrickle shuffled slightly, then sighed. “It’s so hard to get down from these stools.”

  I stood up. “I can-”

  “So I’m not gonna. You know how to contact me, if you need to. Probably don’t say anything secret.” She gathered mana, and in a flash she was gone. With the stool.

  I was pretty sure that belonged with the garden and table.

  “... I’m not cleaning up this tea party,” I said. “We should go before someone tries to make us do that.”

  I had many questions. Like, did the compound not have protections against dimensional travel, or was Wrickle added to a list of exceptions? Alternatively, did she simply bypass the protections? Was that a hint? No, I shouldn’t be teleporting around this place even if I could. But she was certainly showing off for something.

  She gathered mana quickly. Maybe slower than Zentha, though that might not have been her fastest. Faster than me, though.

  Once we were outside the compound, having found our way through the gardens and out of the walled area, Zeb had a comment. “Do you think scones are bad for squirrels?”

  “I’m not sure if the grains are good for them,” I said. “And I’d bet the sugar is bad for them. None of these are chocolate though.”

  “People on Earth really like chocolate, huh?” Zeb commented. “Even though it’s bad for so many things.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just not that bad for larger humanoids.” I looked over at Izzy. “It’s not dangerous for you, is it?”

  “It’s not that bad. Caffeine is worse for me.” She shrugged. “Then again, it’s probably terrible for Jo but they still consume it regularly.”

  Speedsters had an awkward relation with stimulants… and sugar, really. The good ones had bodies that could process the necessary components. The bad ones probably died young. Though maybe with Regenerate they could escape some long term issues.

  “I do have some actual business to attend to,” Sir Kalman commented. “I will meet up with you at the room this evening.”

  -----

  I was kind of dreading the march back. We could have left Sir Kalman on his own, of course, but it seemed pretty rude. Still, that was more than a few days of travel to return somewhere. But of course, the obvious solution was simple.

  Once outside the city, we Teleported. It was uncertain how much the mages knew about that. They knew I had Gate, but my usage of Teleport were less documented in this world.

  Normally, we would have had trouble bringing eight of us. There were limits, after all. But by some metrics, there were actually four of us which was much more comfortable. Subtracting companions, and all that.

  “Arbitrary point to point teleportation is convenient,” Zeb commented.

  “Well, I do have to know the location well,” I pointed out.

  “Or have a picture or video feed,” Midnight added.

  “That works too,” I agreed.

  Zeb nodded. “It’s still way better than most Bunvorixian technology. Personal teleportation is limited in scope without infrastructure.”

  “But you can still do it, right?”

  “Obviously. It’s fairly achievable tech. You just need… well, some parts I don’t have the blueprints memorized for. Sadly.”

  I nodded. “I doubt the techs would let you rest if you could put together all that stuff.”

  I wasn’t sure they actually knew how much she did know, though. She and Khithae had some overlapping knowledge on advanced tech, but couldn’t produce all the steps on their own. Well, even if they could Extra might be a bit upset. They were trying to limit the speed at which upgrades came to the general populace for safety reasons. All the municipal districts appreciated it, even if they might want some of the tech for their own uses.

  Advancement was somewhat inevitable, with tech supers sometimes just stumbling into real tech, especially for the hotspots like New Bay where people kept pouring in. Relative to the actual population, extradimensional and extraterrestrial people weren’t that high, but even averaging a handful per day was well outside the norm.

  I thanked Sir Kalman for the escort. I still wasn’t certain about the motives of most or all of the mages, after all. Izzy and Zeb too. I probably owed them something, even if I didn’t ‘need’ them. It was strange for me to intentionally avoid battle, but I had to consider what Archmages might be able to do. Even if they weren’t willing to turn their tower into a crater, they probably could just turn me into a pile of dust.

  When we got back to Earth, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do about Midred. I didn’t know the older apprentice that well, but I still didn’t want him to get picked up by potentially hostile people. Then again, he might have information I needed.

  I could probably figure it out. But I also had a new book to read. Maybe it would help me figure out why my dimensional magic stuff wasn’t unifying into a single skill… though direct commentary was unlikely on that particular subject. I assumed that wasn’t allowed to be published, since I hadn’t heard of it before experiencing it myself.

  Wrickle seemed nice. I wonder if she had thrown a city into a rift at some point. That sounded like the sort of thing I would have heard about, but probably it would have been in another country.

  And I doubted that Spatial Rift actually enveloped a whole city. It couldn’t be much bigger than Gate. No, it was technically lower level so… a bit smaller? I guess I had to read the book to find out.