Monroe - Chapter 403

Bob fumed as he punched in the number the President had given him.

He hadn’t made a fuss when Harv had been kicked out of the country initially. It wasn’t a big deal, because Harv had other things to do back on Thayland anyway.

That wasn’t to say he’d been happy about it or had agreed with the decision.

He knew Harv, and the video clearly showed that he’d been pushed to act. Harv was a necromancer. He used necromancy to fight, so the result, while somewhat surprising, hadn’t been totally unexpected.

Bob was pretty sure that making Harv persona non-grata had been politically expedient, allowing the government to avoid reporters tracking Harv down for his side of the story. Or the inevitable massacre if people showed up to take him by force.

“Good evening Madam President,” Bob said as the call was answered. “You asked me to call you before I reacted to situations I found intolerable or unjust,” he continued. “So, I’m doing exactly that.”

“Good evening, Bob,” Elania replied, her voice calm but tinged by a hint of exhaustion. “What’s the situation?”

“You remember my friend, Harv?” Bob asked.

He couldn’t hear her response, so he stepped back into the elevator, gesturing for his friends to join him. The reporters were becoming rather loud, some of them reacting to the shock of being sucked dry by a swarm of mosquitoes, while others seemed to find the acid bath moore horrifying, while yet another group was shouting about the loss of their rather expensive recording equipment, and a final group was yelling rather shrilly about being naked.

As the doors closed, he heard the President reply.

“Yes, Harveste Eilodon, the man who developed a simple cure for cancer, which he offered for free. I remember the incident at Johnson and Johnson,” Elania said.

“Well, ironically enough, he received a call from a Special Agent Johnson with the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, informing him that he’s persona non-grata and that they would like him to leave, peacefully, but they’ll use force if necessary,” Bob continued. “Now, I’m sure you can find that video easily enough. Harv was defending himself, plain and simple. He agreed to go along with leaving the country because he didn’t need to stay. Now he’s back, and being threatened again.”

“Tell Mr. Eilodon to stay put for the moment,” Elania sighed. “We didn’t have laws on the books for dealing with extradimensional travelers back then, but we do now. Let me make a few calls. Is there anything else?”

“Maybe?” Bob paused. “A bunch of reporters sort of jumped Amanda, Dave, Jessica, and me as we were exiting the elevator of our hotel, and we might have overreacted a bit. No one died,” he hastened to assure her, “Jessica was able to heal everyone back up, but Dave’s explosion of acid did some real damage to the hotel, their recording equipment, and their clothing.”

“How badly were they hurt?” Elania asked after a long moment.

“Oh, they were super dead,” Bob replied. “Luckily, Jessica is a great healer. I asked Harv to come down and drop a ritual repair spell to fix the lobby and everyone’s stuff, and he told me he had to get out of the country, so I called you.”

After another long pause, the President spoke again. “Ok, so let Harv know that we are working on the issue, and have him fix the damage. Please don’t break anyone or anything else tonight.”

“We’ll do our best,” Bob promised.

Amanda Vasquez had not had a great day, month, or even year.

She’d been doing well, climbing the ladder, and while she hadn’t been a rising star, she was moving up. She’d been the one to catch those two kids, recording an interview that went absolutely viral. Tapped to interview Robert Whitman, Amanda had been ecstatic. Awards, accolades, and fame awaited her. No more special interest pieces, she’d be chairing the morning show.

The interview had started off well, but she’d misread the man, not expecting him to be at all aggressive. All of her research had portrayed him as meek. She’d thought she had him when he opened the door to point out his privilege, but he’d turned it back around on her.

While she knew how popular of a figure he was, she hadn’t accounted for the reasons behind it. Amanda had expected that people would enjoy seeing him taken down a notch, but not only had she failed to score the points she’d wanted to, but the people she’d expected to impress had taken umbridge at her attack.

The network couldn’t fire her, not when she’d cleared her possible questions beforehand. They could deny her a promotion, as well as make sure that the special interest stories she covered were absolute garbage. The network did everything they could to encourage her to leave, but she persisted. It wasn’t like there was anywhere else for her to go.

Reporting was different, after the System Integration. The economy had collapsed and been rebuilt overnight. The new currency was one earned in sweat, blood, and violence. The people who had funded the networks and to a degree controlled what was considered ‘newsworthy’ no longer had the funds to do so. Further, the network’s advertisers suddenly faced the same issue. Mana crystals were the new currency, and they didn’t have any.

As time progressed it had become obvious that the ‘great reset’ had happened, although in a way that none of the economists had predicted. Society had changed, dramatically. Regardless of your education or skills, if you didn’t go into a Dungeon and kill monsters, you were considered to be a second-class citizen. Amanda had graduated at the top of her class from Brown, and she found herself being looked down on by imbeciles who hadn’t even graduated from High School!

It just kept getting worse. People weren’t interested in special interest stories anymore, they wanted stories that highlighted the Dungeons, or worse, stories recorded inside the Dungeons, documenting the various monsters and quests.

It was a nightmare. She’d managed to fight through the oppression of the patriarchy, as well as the discrimination from racist bigots who couldn’t stand to see a strong, independent Latino woman succeed, only to find herself battling against discrimination again, this time because she didn’t want to fight monsters.

Amanda had often screamed her frustrations into her pillow.

But, she was a journalist, through and through. She’d toughed it out. She’d been inside every Dungeon in Los Angeles, dutifully reporting on the deadly hazards they contained and putting together reports on the strategies used by various groups to combat them. She’d taken her pay in mana crystals and used them to level up.

Days had turned into weeks, then months, and then years. She’d been surprised when she’d been called into a meeting with a senior producer. He’d asked if she wanted a shot at redemption, and had explained that someone had spotted Robert Whitman heading into the Hilton hotel downtown. It was an outside chance that Whitman would recognize her, and even less likely that he’d remember her favorably, but as the only familiar face, it was still a chance, and a few words from him could end up going viral.

That was how she’d found herself in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, surrounded by amateurs, all of them shoving and jostling for a chance to get a microphone in front of Whitman when he emerged.

Someone had discovered that the hotel had a single elevator that went to the floor reserved for higher tier people, designed to accommodate their increased height, and everyone was packed in close to it.

The crush of people had become overwhelming as the elevator indicator changed showing that it was descending to the lobby. The boom of a microphone had nearly struck her temple as everyone maneuvered for the best position possible.

Amanda had felt a moment of sympathy for Whitman, who was unlikely to be prepared for what awaited him.

That moment had disappeared as the doors of the elevator opened, and dozens of camera flashes went off as people began to yell questions.

No one had time to actually ask a question. Whitman’s reaction to the storm of light and noise had been to unleash a massive swarm of insects on the crowd, while at the same time, one of his companions sent out a blast of energy.

That was all Amanda could remember, before waking up.

She was on the floor of the lobby, looking up at the ruined ceiling. It looked like a bomb had gone off, with cracks and pockmarks covering everything. Glancing down at herself, fearing the worst, she was equal parts relieved and horrified. She wasn’t hurt at all, but it was clear that she must have been healed, as her clothing was either in tatters (her shoes) or completely gone (her blouse and slacks).

Scrambling to her feet, she sprinted for the bathroom, attempting to cover herself as she ran, kicking off her shoes as she went.

“I just wanted to go out to diner with my friends,” Bob grumbled.

“You’re a big deal,” Amanda replied. “I’d sort of thought people might have moved on a bit, but I guess not.”

They had taken the elevator back up to their floor, where they’d met Harv, who had gone back down to cast a repair ritual. They were standing in the hallway outside of Bob’s suite.

“We should just portal there,” Dave said. “We’ve been there before.”

“We haven’t been there for years,” Amanda contradicted him. “I’d love it if everything was the same, but we can’t know that for sure.”

“I could send a drone over,” Bob offered, pulling the palm-size device from his inventory.

“Perfect,” Dave agreed. “Send it over and let it scout out the environment, then we’ll portal in.”

“I should have thought of that in the first place, saved us all the trouble,” Bob muttered.

“Hey,” Jessica slid her arm under his and leaned against his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known, none of us could, and we all reacted reflexively. This isn’t your fault. They ambushed us, and we’ve been trained to react to that with overwhelming force.”

“This isn’t on us,” Amanda agreed, sliding one of her arms under Dave’s and the other under Jessica’s. “Also, Jessi healed them, and Harv is going to fix the damage to their stuff and to the lobby, so ultimately there wasn’t any real harm done.”

Bob relaxed a little. “True,” he nodded.

“Good,” Jessica beamed. “Now that we’ve put that out of mind, how about you get that little beauty flying so we can get going?”

Bob nodded and opened the door to his suite. Crossing the room he looked out the window, concentrating for a moment. A portal rose out of the carpet in front of him, while another appeared in midair just outside the window. He stuck his hand through it, and the small drone lifted off his palm.

Withdrawing his hand, the portal closed, and Bob tapped his armband, the drone zipping away.

The drone had been enhanced by Alex, something he’d claimed took almost no effort. The result had been a drastic increase in both its speed and range. Normally only good for about forty miles an hour, the drones they’d taken with them on their two-year adventure could fly at sixty.

Bob directed it to the Denny’s, happily noting that the drone was still perfectly willing to make use of google maps.

He turned away from the window to find Amanda and Jessica slowly working their way through the rack of clothing that had been left by Larry.

“This is really nice,” Amanda observed. “Is it enchanted? It feels almost cooler than it should be.”

“According to Larry, that is Mountain Mist wool, and it was created by using the Divine Schools of Elemental Air and Elemental Water,” Bob replied. “I’m not sure how it works, but apparently the sheep breed true with that unusual quality to their wool.”

“That’s some proper wizardry there,” Jessica observed. “I’d be keen to find out how that works.”

“Take a look at it with your mana sight,” Bob suggested. “It might be acting like an enchantment, but the mana flows are completely different. You can see how the wool strands actually have a sort of attunement to water and air mana, and they’re pulling the ambient mana with that energy into themselves. I can’t tell what’s happening inside the fibers, but the mana that passes through them feels a bit weaker, so I suspect that it’s somehow using that energy to fuel the effect.”

“I’d bet it isn’t as effective in a dry and hot climate,” Jessica mused.

“Probably not,” Bob agreed. “Although, I think you could probably do something similar with fire and air to draw heat away. It would have the side effect of wicking away sweat quite quickly, which could easily lead to dehydration.”

“It’s amazing what people have come up with already,” Amanda said.

“The tech sector stalled for a bit, but they’ve rallied,” Dave added. “We really need to see Alex while I’m here. I’ve been surfing a bit, and there were some incredible strides in integrating magic with technology. One of the biggest, that made the girl who figured out crazy rich, was a ritual slash circuit combination that slowly drains a mana crystal, converting it into electricity. Every phone, tablet, and laptop has one, you just socket a crystal into it and you get a bunch of charges off of it. Phones get like a hundred or more.”

“Not a big deal when we’re operating off the Freedom,” Bob replied.

“Sure, not a big deal to us, but there are a lot of places in the world, including here in the States, where electrical service hasn’t been restored,” Dave shook his head. “The ability to fix every problem with magic. People came together and figured out magical air conditioning and magical refrigerators, which are really just stasis boxes, which are actually better than traditional refrigerators. Then she comes along with her convenient ‘magic to battery’ discovery, and suddenly getting the grid back up isn’t as important.”

Bob nodded. “The Thayland problem,” he agreed.

When your only tool is a hammer, everything looked like a nail. The problem wasn’t helped by the fact that magic was such an awfully versatile tool. It really could fix every problem, if you applied enough of it. Of course, that led to using it for problems for which a mundane solution was not only available but would be less expensive and more effective to implement.

Bob’s armband vibrated. He checked the display and saw that it was the President.

“Dave, can you take over piloting the drone for me?” Bob asked. “I should definitely take this.”