Paranoid Mage - cChapter 1– Gayle

Gayle Hargrave listened to the earth-shaking rumbling and crashing outside of Lucile Harper’s cell in Garrison Two. It was one thing to snipe obvious monsters from the safety of a fortified wall, and it was another to actually be in the middle of things. A sudden burst of hot air washing under the cell door made her flinch, before an enormous hole appeared above them. She barely saw the magic and certainly didn’t have time to react before it swept down, devouring them in darkness.

She felt herself spin through the air for a long eternal second before she landed heavily on something padded, letting out a grunt. A groan came from beside her and she had to stifle a shriek before she realized that it was just Lucile. Gayle would freely admit she was terrified; they weren’t any longer in Garrison Two, they weren’t even in a portal world, and there was no telling what would happen.

Finally, she laid a hand on her focus band, but before she could figure out which one was her illumination focus, a window opened and bright light streamed in. Gayle scrambled to her feet, putting together a negative healing dart as she squinted at the window. There wasn’t a person there and, in fact, it wasn’t even a window, but a disc that was letting in sunlight that revealed bare gray stone all around them.

“Lucy?” A voice came through the hole. A voice Gayle recognized.

Lucile popped upright in the dim light, her muscles tense and rigid, her fists clenched hard enough to draw blood. Cords stood out on her neck. She looked ready to throw a punch, but her face was completely blank when she replied.

“Of House Harper, that’s me.” Lucile’s voice was far too loud, bouncing off the walls of the small cave. As soon as she said it, she relaxed, breathing hard as all the tension drained out of her and almost losing her balance on the cheap padded blankets the light had revealed underfoot.

“Professor Brown?” Gayle demanded in the brief silence afterward, almost incredulous. She knew Callum Wells was an incredibly dangerous criminal – she kept having to remind herself that the Professor Brown she knew had been a lie – but she still found it hard to believe.

“…Gayle?” Wells said, sounding just as surprised as her. “Of all the— alright, this complicates things,” Wells muttered to himself. “Gayle, I need you to take a few steps away from Lucy, please.” He sounded so reasonable that she took a step before she realized what she was doing and stopped, crossing her arms and frowning. She wasn’t sure what Wells wanted, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to be helping him.

“Now, now, you wait just a minute!” Gayle said, managing not to splutter it. “I’m a member of the Bureau of Secret Enforcement, and you two are both criminals! I can’t just do whatever you tell me!”

“Gayle, do we really have to do this?” What instantly quenched her indignation was not that Wells sounded angry or upset or even threatening. He just sounded tired. “I know that healing magic is dangerous but I don’t think either of us want to fight.”

“I don’t want you to fight either,” Lucile said. “Especially not since I’m in the blast radius! Seriously though, you don’t seem a bad sort and the big man there is pretty scary.”

Gayle glared at Lucile, but her heart wasn’t in it. She found the entire situation surreal, completely unlike anything she had trained for. The only spell form she had that might help was the one that killed people, and it could kill mages with their shields up! Yet she couldn’t imagine actually trying to kill a person, especially one she knew. If she could even target him.

Which she couldn’t.

“Fine,” she grumbled, and stepped over to the bare stone wall. Vis surrounded Lucy, so light it was only a glimmering in Gayle’s magical sight, and Lucile disappeared. Leaving her alone in a small stone room. With no entrances or exits save the tiny window of sunlight. “Um,” she said.

“Why were you holding Lucy hostage?” Wells asked.

“I wasn’t holding her hostage!” Gayle said indignantly. She was kind of supposed to, but there was never any real chance of that.

“It’s not Gayle holding me hostage,” Lucy agreed.

“Oh. Fucking hell,” Wells swore. Gayle’s ears burned.

“Mister Wells,” she said, shocked.

“Sorry,” he said, apparently by reflex. “Is that fae magic?”

“That’s righ…” Lucile’s voice trailed off oddly and Gayle worried at her bottom lip with her teeth while there was silence from the window.

“Gayle.” Wells’ voice was flat. “Can I trust you to heal Lucy?”

“I— what?” She felt like she was having trouble keeping up with events. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. Will you do it?”

“Yes?” Gayle was a healer. That was what she wanted to do and how she thought of herself. She wasn’t willingly going to stand by while someone suffered. Not that she could see either of them at the moment, but that wasn’t relevant. A moment later, Lucile reappeared on the padded floor, but she was stretched on her back and either unconscious or close to it. Gayle stepped over and knelt down, extending her magic to the woman with a frown.

“Can you drop your bubble, please?” Wells asked. Gayle blushed.

“Mister Wells, that is highly inappropriate!”

“I suppose that’s true,” Wells said slowly. “Pull it back close, then. I want to keep an eye on Lucy myself.” Under the circumstances she couldn’t well argue his caution, so she made an effort of will to pull her sphere of authority tighter around herself.

Using her magic on a mundane – Lucile was close enough to count – was more difficult than on a mage. Normally a healer could count on a mage’s vis to do some of the work, but with a mundane she needed to be more selective and careful. Active healing senses were a mess of returns and she was no where near being an expert on what it all meant. Nevertheless, she was pretty certain there was nothing actually wrong with Lucile. Sure enough, just a hint of a low-powered refresh resulted in Lucile’s eyes opening, and she sat up with a groan.

“Can you talk about it now?” Wells asked immediately.

“I don’t know what you’re asking about, big man,” Lucile replied immediately.

“You take a rest then, Lucy.” Wells’ voice gentled. “We’ll figure this out.”

“I feel fine,” Lucile assured him with a brittle smile that betrayed her words. Gayle didn’t know what to think of such false bravado, especially coupled with some ailment she couldn’t detect or cure.

“I’m sure you do,” Callum said neutrally. “Gayle, do you have any idea how to purge fae mana from someone?”

“I— no?” Gayle blinked. “I guess get another fae to remove it?”

“That isn’t likely. What about a portal world? Would that erode it?”

“Umm.” Gayle considered the question. “Maybe? I know they had extra portals into Garrison Two so fae could function, but I don’t know about once they’ve actually done something.”

“Then we’ll do that. Keep an eye on her for me, please.”

“I will?” She wasn’t exactly sure what Wells intended to do, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea. Or at the very least a legal idea. Not that she blamed him, if he had some way to fix whatever was wrong.

“And thank you.” Wells voice sounded tired again. “While we’re here, I want to apologize for what happened to you. They told me that you got packed off to black ops because of my advice. I wouldn’t have done that to you on purpose, and I know that’s not an excuse, but I just didn’t know.”

“Oh.” Gayle was struck speechless. She’d gone over what she might say to him, and vice versa, so many times in her head, but she’d never thought he’d just flatly apologize. Her thoughts flew in useless circles, pointing out the apology didn’t make sense, that there was no way he could be unaware of the esoteric rules if he was so skilled. He seemed to be acting as if he were from some completely foreign land she’d never heard of.

“You’ll have to hang on for a bit. I’ll drop you off when I get a chance but I need to take care of Lucy first.”

“I told you, I’m fine,” Lucile butted in, with an even more brittle smile than before. She wobbled from where she had propped herself up on an elbow, and Gayle sent out another probe of healing magic. Yet again, there didn’t seem to be anything she could exactly fix. “Where exactly are we anyway, big man? Guess we’re not in the Deep Wilds anymore?”

“You’re somewhere safe,” Wells replied, and Gayle, while still quite flustered, didn’t miss that it wasn’t exactly an answer.

***

The rescue itself had gone well, except for one worrying complication. Nothing had compelled him to show up himself, which was a damn good thing considering the terrifyingly powerful bubbles that had been on the other side. Nobody had even died, and while he was forced to grab someone he didn’t intend to, at least he’d been able to. He hadn’t been at all confident of his ability to sweep a portal faster than a mage could disrupt it.

Fortunately for him, the mage in question was definitely not combat trained. Callum had only recognized Gayle in hindsight, since she was wearing a slightly tactical uniform and her blonde hair was cut shorter. The slightly bewildered blue eyes were the same, though.

With Lucy, he hadn’t known what to expect, but he was still somewhat thrown by the brunette with a small oval face who looked and dressed like she was out of a 1940s Sears Catalogue. Given how she’d talked about how isolated and outcast she was, he thought she’d be plain and frumpy, not strikingly attractive.

She was the complication. Immediately using the duress phrase and then practically collapsing in his arms was not exactly the triumphant introduction he’d hoped for. While he had no idea what exactly they’d done, he could sense a little bit of the swirly fae magic about her and even inside her. He had thought that shoving magical forms into someone else was impossible aside from healing magic, but Lucy didn’t have the dense, impenetrable vis of a vamp or a shifter. Hers was closer to a normal person’s, which he still had to work to see through with his perceptions, but he could do it.

Despite his worries, he couldn’t just leave the evidence of his presence lying around. Cleaning up the campsite was just a matter of teleporting everything directly over to his cache, including the dewar and the portal anchors he’d used for his assault. While having access to fresh lava was useful, having a portal anchor pair free was more useful and it wasn’t like he could trust the lava-side setup to stay, even if supernaturals couldn’t trace him. For all he knew some tourist group would come through later in the day, to say nothing of what the actual volcano itself might do.

He shifted the portal end that led to Gayle’s location inside his cave-cache as well, so it had the mana to stay open on its own, and he teleported himself to the surface above his cache so he could get to traveling. Out came the flying-chair and once again he lofted himself into the air. If he’d left a portal anchor in the Deep Wilds he might have been able to use that portal world to cleanse Lucy, but that was an impossible wish. There was really only one portal world he could get to.

Portal World Six.

Callum still didn’t know what exactly the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán portal held, why it was considered empty, or what defenses might be in place. However, the effectiveness of his portal anchor in the BSE base gave him fair confidence about using it again to infiltrate Portal World Six, and it wasn’t like he had many options. At least, not if he wanted to help Lucy quickly. He didn’t know what was wrong with her, but he had a feeling it’d only get worse.

The precise location of Portal World Six was somewhere on his laptop, and while he could have gotten it out to check, he had doubts the records were accurate. He really didn’t trust any of the official information, and once he got close he could use the mana flow to locate the actual source rather than relying on any official information. Assuming he could get close without having to plow through a bunch of mage defenses. More realistically, he’d bypass them, but in his current mood he felt inclined toward smashing things.

He was actually fairly fresh, magically speaking. The assault on the GAR base had been stressful but he hadn’t actually done all that much. Opened less than a dozen portals, only one of them large, and none of them sustained. The gravity launcher he’d cobbled together was actually more effort, and there’d been plenty of mana pouring through the portals to help with recovery.

Even as vis-intensive as chair flying was, he wasn’t that far from the Portal World location, by design. He only needed a few jaunts to cross the isthmus and home in on the portal location, so it only took him a couple minutes to touch down close enough to start using normal teleports instead. The flying chair was fast, despite how much he mistrusted the process.

“Everyone okay in there?” He asked, opening a new speaking-portal into the cave where Gayle and Lucy were sequestered. Originally he’d planned to have Lucy change into a fresh set of clothes, just in case hers had trackers, and maybe even run her through an airport scanner to make sure there were no implants, but that had been kicked in the head by the current crisis. Even taking Lucy out in the first place had been a bad idea, fueled by the panic of the moment, but at least the only place he’d given away was the volcano spot. Anyone who wanted to was welcome to comb that as much as they wanted; he didn’t have anything there.

He was still a little worried someone might show up at the cave he’d hidden the girls in, since if there was some kind of tracker that worked like the paired spatial enchants, he wouldn’t be able to sense it operating. Especially if Gayle had it on her person. Homebonds were a technology he’d taken from them in the first place, after all.

“Just peachy, big man,” Lucy’s voice came, but it sounded a little wrong. He didn’t know if he was actually hearing it, or it was just his imagination since he knew she wasn’t in her right mind. “When are we going to be able to get out and stretch our legs?”

“Won’t be long now,” he said, not entirely lying. While he was cautious all the time, it hurt to actively mistrust Lucy, even if it wasn’t her fault. Especially if it wasn’t her fault. Of course, he mistrusted Gayle too, but unless she was a superb actor, he was pretty sure she wasn’t actively trying to trip him up. Which was in a way more dangerous, because that made her very unpredictable.

“Wait, you’re just going to a Portal World?” Gayle protested. “They aren’t going to let you stay inside the defenses! You can’t expect to just, just, wander around in the wilderness!”

“I don’t really intend to. Besides, I have some advantages.”

He had to drop the phone-portal to teleport. Or rather, he didn’t have to, but keeping it open and wrapping his teleportation framework around it was more effort than he wanted to expend for the moment. It wasn’t hard, but he was a big believer in the sum of percents and when going into an unknown situation every edge mattered.

The portal world site was out in the countryside near San Lorenzo, out by the bogs, rather than on the coast. At least, that was what he remembered, but the mana density didn’t seemed to be rising like it had near the portal worlds in Europe. It was definitely still above the levels in the States, but he was starting to think that even Lucy’s information was wrong before he finally caught some actual flow.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t in the air, but rather, underground, a languid flow through the water table. The mana in the air seemed to be coming up from the ground, through the ponds and cenotes that dotted the area. Once he realized that, following it back to the source was not particularly difficult. He was glad he didn’t have to actually walk the area, though, because it was marshy and boggy and it would have been an absolute bear to slog through on foot.

“Almost there,” he informed the women, popping open a temporary phone-portal.

“That was fast! What’d you do, big man, sneak through the GAR transport system?” Callum suppressed a sigh as he ignored Lucy’s obviously leading question. He was sure now that her voice really was off, and it wasn’t his imagination. Not that he would have necessarily minded answering the question if they were alone, but with Gayle right there he wasn’t going to give away any secrets.

“Do you know anything useful about Portal World Six?” He asked instead, since it wasn’t like he’d be able to hide where he was if he was to actually use it. “Either of you?”

“It’s supposed to be empty,” Gayle said. “But it’s not safe either. Nobody really bothers with it.”

“Sorry, big man. I don’t remember anything interesting about it.”

“I guess I’ll have to find out myself, then.”

“Don’t!” Gayle pleaded. “If something happens to you we’ll be stuck in a cave!”

“That’s a fair point,” he conceded. “I’ll do something about that before taking any risks.” Risk was the main reason he hadn’t checked up on Portal World Six any earlier, despite building his bunker relatively close to it. Portal Worlds were dangerous, he’d already seen that, and he hadn’t seen any point to indulging what was ultimately just curiosity to find out.

Portaling Gayle out of the cave to the surface was probably a reasonable way to handle things, if he did it just before he and Lucy went into the portal world. At this point it seemed obvious she didn’t have a homebond, since they probably hadn’t expected him to be able to abduct her.

Not that he’d expected it, either.

Another minute or so brought him near the actual portal, to judge both from the underground mana currents and the magical constructs that popped up on the edges of his perception. He stopped there and used his portal anchor to scout further ahead. It’d already proven that it was hard to detect, and the worst that could happen was that it would be destroyed. Which was bad, but not as bad as an actual injury.

The odd thing was that the spell forms didn’t seem to be wards. They didn’t look like what he’d seen set up around various GAR places, anyway, especially since they seemed to be along the interior of an underground cave system. A partly flooded one, at that.

Though calling it a system might have been overselling things somewhat. It seemed a somewhat large cenote that had been walled over in the past – he was pretty sure he could make out the signs of earth-magic worked stone – that linked up with an underground stream. In all, he could probably call the cenote cave a temple, as every inch of the wall was carved. Or had been carved, at some point; the wet stone had done a pretty good job of eroding away anything recognizable other than a few human-shaped silhouettes.

Despite that, there was no recent sign of human presence aside from the enchantments themselves. There weren’t any personnel, no small outpost with teleporters. He hesitated to call it abandoned, because everything seemed too neat and tidy for that, and he knew that enchantments didn’t last forever, but it seemed empty at the moment. Whatever caretakers there were seemed to be gone at the moment.

Perhaps responding to an emergency elsewhere. Like a lava-filled outpost in the Deep Wilds, perhaps. Though the lack of guards was itself unnerving, like the portal world could take care of itself. Or those within it could, like with the dragonlands. He’d have to be on guard and ready to leave at the slightest twitch.

The portal was in the center of the cenote, but it looked completely different to his senses than any of the portals he’d seen before. If the other portals were generally holes held open by a magic framework, this one was ripped open and pinned in place. Quite literally. A mana-dense shard of some material had plunged out of one side of the portal and lanced into the ground, burying itself several feet into the rock.

Calling it something really undersold the menace the material gave off even through his spatial perception. It wasn’t like it was malevolent as such, but it had several planes and angles terminating in edges so sharp that he swore they cut the mana flow itself. Not to mention that the fundamental nature of space, that thing he could only feel in the vaguest terms, seemed distorted in close proximity to it. Maybe it had cut through into the world, rather than being a proper portal.

As a consequence, it leaned drunkenly at an angle to the floor, rather than being oriented properly up and down like the other portals he’d seen. The other side of the portal was traversable, but the weirdness of the space seemed to persist inside, so he wasn’t really looking forward to going in himself. It was obvious that despite what he had thought, this really wasn’t the same as the other portal worlds.

While he was studying it, he realized what the magical constructs around the cave were for, since they weren’t wards. Somehow, the mana outflow from the portal was being contained and redirected downward into the ground. Or rather, into the water. He was baffled as to why, but it at least explained the relatively lower mana levels aboveground.

Mana confinement and redirection enchantments were actually something he could use, but that would have to be some other day. He had an emergency to deal with and couldn’t spare too much time gawking. Callum pushed a vis thread through the portal, into the empty area he could sense on the other side, and teleported the focus through.

Immediately he ran into issues. The portal bobbled as usual, but his attempts to re-stabilize it were only partly successful. The recirculation network and the mana intakes kept collapsing, and while the primary portal structure did work it was highly strained, on the verge of destabilizing itself. For a few moments he ignored the surroundings as he wrestled with the portal anchor, ready to teleport it back if he couldn’t get it to function right.

When he did set up a teleport framework around the anchor, he realized the problem in a sudden flash of insight. The space was different there, and while his manually created constructs conformed almost without any input from him, the ones created by the enchantments were static. They couldn’t adapt to the differences, so they just failed. It was a weakness in the portal anchor setup he hadn’t anticipated, but then, he hadn’t really known how different the portal worlds could really be. Under the circumstances, and considering that his spatial perception really didn’t tell him much, Callum opened a portal to see what the portal world actually looked like for himself.

He blinked at obsidian and ash.

Rather than eternal day or eternal night, portal world six was dark, yet everything was still clearly visible. Not that there was much to see. Jagged spires of mana-rich obsidian thrust into the air in every direction, smooth and glassy except where they came to wickedly sharp points or edges. Flakes of what looked like ash drifted down from a featureless sky, landing on the flat obsidian of the ground and the tilted spires, yet failing to accumulate there.

The longer he looked, the more it hurt his eyes trying to figure out exactly what he was seeing. It was like time wasn’t passing, or a single moment was repeating. The sight was so weird that he almost lost control of the portal anchor while he was distracted. Apparently his interpretation of the GAR information about Portal World Six had been off-base.

Given how strange it was, he wasn’t going to go in there himself without testing things. He cast about and found some sort of rodent nearby, and promptly teleported it into the portal world. It froze, looking around in short jerks of its head, but it didn’t keel over or get attacked. That cleared up most of Callum’s worries, even if Six was a very strange place.

“Okay Gayle,” he said, after teleporting the rodent back to the surface and reclaiming the portal anchor. He was having issues keeping it open inside Six, so he couldn’t use it too easily at the moment. The question was whether the same would be true for his gut-portal, or whether his body’s vis would prevent the issue. “I’ll open a portal for you but I advise you not to wander too far.”

“What? Why not?” Gayle sounded a little affronted. It was better than the quaver of fear from before, something that had made Callum feel exceedingly guilty, but he had to wonder if she really understood what was going on. Though to be fair, he was pretty sure she was quite sheltered.

“Well, it’s the middle of nowhere. I’m sure you’d rather not have to try and hike to civilization yourself.”

“Oh.”

“Lucy, you’re with me.”

“Sure we all can’t stay together, big man?”

“I don’t think Gayle wants to go where we’re going,” Callum said, and opened a portal between the cave they were in and the wilderness just above said cave. It was a bleak December day, so it wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it wasn’t like it was dangerous either. Gayle practically fled out of the opening though, and he wondered if maybe she was slightly claustrophobic.

Lucy, weirdly, tried to follow, but Callum reached out and teleported her over next to him. She stumbled and gagged from the disorientation of the trip, and he winced at how rude it was to do that without saying anything. He’d been only been targeting himself and people he couldn’t or didn’t want to warn, and he made a note to himself to try and retrain his impulses.

“Jeez, warn a girl before you do something like that,” she admonished, once she got ahold of her stomach. She didn’t seem to be as badly affected as the Connors had been, though whether that was due to his improved control or her more robust vis he didn’t know.

“Sorry, Lucy,” he said, though there hadn’t been much choice. “I’ll need you to follow me.”

“Into Portal World Six? You think that’s a good idea?” She asked doubtfully.

“It may not be, but I think it’s necessary.” He threaded his vis back into the portal world and opened a passageway for himself and Lucy. “Please?” He added, offering her his hand. She stared at him a moment, as if weighing the idea, before taking his hand gingerly and letting him pull her through the portal.

Inside the portal world it was considerably stranger than he’d anticipated even after his preview. It smelled of cold ash and hot obsidian, although he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to say he knew those smells before he stepped through into Six. Nevertheless, he had a deep impression that was what he was smelling, though the air itself was neither hot nor cold.

The sky was not really a sky, but more obsidian spires, jutting into view from various angles, their origin hidden by the haze of ash that drifted downward. He’d put them in a clear area not far from the portal, but in every direction razor-edged obsidian sprouted from the ground, almost seeming to move from the corner of his eye. It was completely and fully creepy, with no sound but the faintest noise of water coming through the portal, but his perceptions didn’t catch anything alarming so he kept a firm grip on his nerves.

“I tell you what, big man, this is the weirdest place anyone’s taken me for a date,” Lucy said, glancing around with wide eyes. The sound of her voice was weirdly insulated, not exactly muffled but more as if it didn’t travel past a few feet.

“Well, I thought our first one ought to be more dramatic than dinner and a movie,” he said, though he wasn’t really feeling the banter. Instead he kept a close eye on the tangle of fae magic superimposed on Lucy’s body. If he was right, then being denied access to any of the mana that came from Faerie would choke it off, and the native mana of Six might even actively corrode it.

If he was wrong, he’d have to deal with Ferrochar to get it removed. That wasn’t something he wanted to do, but he refused to worry over it while he was in the middle of his first idea. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.

“Well, you sure know how to pick ‘em,” Lucy said, staring around at the falling ash and the brightly-lit darkness. “Why did you feel the need to come here, anyway?”

“To hide out from anyone that might be looking for us,” Callum said, which was only half a lie. “Pretty sure that nobody can track us into here.”

Considering what the surrounding space did to his portal enchantment, he suspected any other enchantments that he might be missing would be similarly impaired. His gut-portal, thankfully, did seem to be stable, though Callum suspected that was because of the vis insulation. Something that Lucy didn’t really have.

That meant he still had a connection back to where Gayle was standing out in the scrub, frowning and shivering when he opened a small portal to check on her. With her bubble, all he could tell was that she was there. Callum wasn’t heartless, so he grabbed a camp chair and some blankets, dropping them next to Gayle.

“Thank you,” Gayle said, and Lucy snorted, poking him in the side.

“Come on, big man, you shouldn’t be checking on other girls when you’re on a date.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said with a smile. Even if she was under some sort of weird enchantment, she was still Lucy. “Speaking of, let me get some stuff to make this more comfortable.” Even at the time he’d thought that stacking up a bunch of chairs and tables in the cave-cache was overkill, but now he was glad of it. He pulled a few chairs over, along with some bottled water.

“It’s not exactly a fancy restaurant, but it’ll do,” he said.

“Man, I don’t know that I’m ever going to get used to that,” Lucy said, reaching out to touch the suddenly-appearing chair before taking a seat. “Thanks.”

“I’d be a poor host if I didn’t provide this much,” he said, keeping a close metaphorical eye on the swirly fae magic around her. It might be fainter, but it might also be his imagination. It hadn’t been more than a minute.

“Honestly, big man, I’m just glad you got me out of there. That’s a pretty deep hole to find yourself in, you know?”

“I do know,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was going to leave you to their tender mercies.”

“I kinda figured, but until you showed up I was still worried. How’d you manage to get inside there anyway, big man? It’s not like just anyone can walk in.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Did Chester help you?”

“I’ll fill you in later,” Callum said, hating to keep deflecting her but he wasn’t going to answer questions like that until he was sure she was clear of influences. Not to mention the portal to Gayle was still open. “Right now it’s best to just relax and hang out, weird as this place is.”

“Yeah, I don’t know how much relaxing I can get done here,” Lucy said, reaching for one of the bottles of water he’d put on the table. “It’s too quiet. And just weird.”

“It is at that,” Callum agreed. “Chock full of enchanting materials though, maybe. I might go ahead and grab some while we’re waiting.”

“Don’t let me stop you, big man,” Lucy said. “I’m happy just hanging out. At least for now. Gotta say, the bits of portal worlds I’ve seen before were way tamer than this place.”

“Portal World Six is probably off-limits for a reason,” Gayle put in stiffly, after trying and failing to ignore the conversation. She couldn’t get right up to the portal without her bubble interfering, but she was about as close as she could manage. “I don’t think you should be there at all! Let alone take anything.”

“Probably not,” Callum agreed. “But my options are limited.” Life would be a lot easier if he was just willing to steal whatever he wanted. There were plenty of soft targets, magical and mundane. But if he’d been willing to take the easy route he’d never have run from GAR to begin with.

Which meant he could hardly pass up an opportunity to secure a good amount. The sheer amount of mana-infused glass around was staggering. It probably wasn’t as good as a bane material, but for low-grade enchantments there was more than enough.

He wasn’t the first one to have the idea. Less than fifty yards away, though not visible through the jutting spires, was an area where there had clearly been harvesting going on. A relatively large spike had been toppled and parts of it had been carved out, though not all the loose material had been taken. There were chips and shavings and jagged chunks just lying around, which he swept up and deposited in his cave-cache.

Callum was considering taking the entire spike when the whispers started.