Paranoid Mage - eChapter 22: Reality

Callum cradled his new daughter, looking at her tiny wrinkled face while Lucy slept. The house was quiet, the light filtering in through the windows was warm, and the fresh air blowing in from the garden was sweet. It was peaceful in a way that he hadn’t really experienced since the halcyon days of youth, and all his worries seemed so distant. Though part of that was because most of the things he’d been worried about had been taken care of.

He was certainly glad little Alice had waited to be born until after all the nonsense with Janry and the subsequent reveal to the world. There hadn’t been any terrible incidents he needed to deal with, but there had been lots of shuttling to do while permanent portal infrastructure was being set up. Going public had actually been a relief. A few days of chaotic markets and various level of riot in a few places, but the general public had settled down fairly quickly. Some people, and some governments, were still so obviously hostile to supernaturals that nobody was going to be living there anytime soon, but even something as big as magic existing couldn’t hold the headlines for all that long.

There were still bills passing through the governments of half the countries in the world, debates, endless news articles, but it was just one of many things in the general furor of civilization. The problems weren’t over, but he didn’t have to worry about either a shadow war or a nuclear one. He didn’t even have to worry about the inevitable political nonsense, because he was out of it.

He glanced out of the open door at where Alex was driving around a miniature car in the back yard, and waved at his son. Alex waved back enthusiastically, nearly crashing into the porch, and Callum chuckled, waving again and making a face at his son. While Alex had dutifully met his little sister, there wasn’t much he could do while she was sleeping and Callum was too distracted to try anything else at the moment.

“Hey, I think it’s my turn.”

Callum looked over to where Lucy had woken up, sitting up partway and making grabby hands in his direction. He chuckled and stood up, walking the few paces from the bedroom door and handing over Alice. Lucy cradled her daughter and made kissy noises before looking back up at him.

“Anything happen during my nap?”

“Nah,” Callum said, taking Alice back and settling her into the bassinet offering his hand to her to help Lucy up from the bed. “We got a half-dozen emails about portals but no actual emergencies.”

“Bah, we’re on vacation,” Lucy said, dismissing the inquiries from various presidents, premiers, and kings, and taking his hand to stand up. “They can wait.”

“Yeah,” Callum agreed. He found he was less impressed by such titles after all he’d been through. “I’m still worried I’m going to get a ping from Chester or Taisen and have something dire happening.”

“They can solve their own problems,” Lucy said, the two of them walking outside into the pleasant sunny warmth of their private portal world. “They’ve got mages and dragons and Felicia’s Gates. We’ve put in enough effort.”

In the weeks that followed, most of the demand on House Wells was actually Lucy’s business. Various Houses settling into their own private portal worlds wanted proper internet and, combined with mages clueless about modern electronics, it made for an amusing and frustrating type of tech support. Information infrastructure wasn’t magic, and that was the problem.

She spent a lot of time on the phone, though a great may problems were mitigated when one of the dragons simply created an internet provider. It wasn’t one of the dragons Callum had been properly introduced to, and the provider wasn’t large, but it was good enough. The dragon could simply create new infrastructure from nothing and run optical fibers through tiny feeder portals, so there was just one building and Lucy didn’t have to deal with third or fourth parties to get the installations done.

He spent most of his time with his kids, but in his spare hours Callum found an opportunity to go back to his old profession. While mage Houses were sturdy and well-decorated, many of them were woefully designed. They just aped Gothic or Tudor styles without any real understanding of things like airflow or plumbing or wiring.

It was great fun working with the Guild of Enchanting to create designs that incorporated the possibilities of magic and enchantments along with more conventional infrastructure. He didn’t know who might be using his designs, but they probably didn’t even know the plans came from The Ghost. Like the portal world distribution, it was done through Rossi both because Callum didn’t feel like dickering and because it kept things anonymous.

The money from that was deposited into a new account in a bank run by Miami’s fae prince, Ferrochar. There had been some financial fallout in the markets from the supernatural reveal, just due to panic and speculation, but Ferrochar had so many existing contacts within Earth’s financial space that he’d taken over the bulk of the currency conversions. So far most of the Houses hadn’t bothered to try and sell their services, as they were used to just dealing directly with other mages or fae, but it was only a matter of time.

Unfortunately, while things seemed to be going mostly well when it came to the public knowledge of supernaturals, Chester was still having issues. The media blitz around what had happened at his compound had done a lot of damage, and even an official Presidential pardon didn’t really fix that. Callum was pretty sure that if the government wanted to, they could have cleared up all the legal issues surrounding Chester’s properties and people, but the higher ups weren’t quite so grateful as to remove the leverage they had against the local supernaturals.

“It’ll pass eventually,” Chester said when he visited, lounging appreciatively in a shifter-sized lawn chair. With his own private bad penny and homebond, Chester could travel the portal worlds as he pleased, and the shifter had played host so many times Callum had no problem inviting him over on occasion. “I actually figured it’d be worse, considering everything.”

“Governments don’t like the idea of being manipulated or deceived. At least not when it becomes known,” Callum agreed, teleporting a couple of beers from the fridge. He handed one to Chester, who popped the stop off with a flick of his thumb.

“Exactly. Not being able to read in some of my allies ahead of time hurt, too. I wanted to, but Janry jumped the gun.” Chester shrugged and took a drink. “Still, I have to admit I’m a little disappointed, and I was thinking about other options for the future.”

“Yeah?” Callum raised his eyebrows, stretched out in his own chair watching Alex and a half-dozen shifter kids tear around the front yard. “I mean, I’d be happy to find you a portal world, but you’re kind of stuck to the Deep Wilds, aren’t you?”

“Sadly, yes. But I was thinking about the future. Ultimately the Deep Wilds portal itself needs to be moved somewhere that isn’t owned by one government or another. Some of my pack are putting together a pressure chamber and we might prevail upon you to move it to the seafloor somewhere.” Chester’s hand snapped out to catch a flying foam football, tossing it back to the kids.

“That is not a problem,” Callum assured him.

“The same team is also putting together a larger pressurized compound,” Chester confided “I’ve got a somewhat trickier request. I know that you have portals out in space. Given that all the land on Earth is more or less claimed, what about the moon?”

“Ha! Werewolves on the moon,” Callum said with a laugh. “I know you aren’t werewolves but it still amuses me.

“Wait until Lucy hears about it,” Chester said dryly. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I think there’s even a song about it,” Callum agreed with a smile. “Absolutely doable, though. I honestly thought about doing that myself, but a portal world is a lot more livable. Since that isn’t an option for you…” He shrugged and sipped at his own beer. “Keep in mind I’m still not great at transporting large things. I’ll have to bring it over in pieces.”

“Believe me, just being able to casually transport stuff to the moon’s surface is more than enough.” Chester lifted his beer in salute. “Especially if it means that nobody’s going to find out I’m taking up room in a national park.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that certain people would hold that against you,” Callum agreed, reaching out through his moon nexus and grabbing a space drone. Chester’s request clearly wasn’t all that time-sensitive, but Callum figured he might as well pull up a visual while they were talking. He didn’t want to bother Lucy, who was pestering Lisa for cookie recipes, so he pulled his laptop to him and brought up the feed himself. “I can imagine a bunch of people are going to be mad if you’re the first moon colonist too, but oh well.”

“Can’t please everyone,” Chester agreed, leaning over to look at the feed of the stark moonscape. “That is absolutely surreal.”

“There’s a reason why I’m glad I found this place,” Callum said, gesturing out at the sunny day, the pleasant breeze, the rainbows of blowing mist in the distance from island waterfalls. “The moon sounds great and all, but it’s really not that exciting.”

“You’re definitely biased,” Chester said with a chuckle. “I don’t think I’d like to stay here long term myself, but you’re damned lucky you found something this good.”

“I admit it,” Callum said. “Though there are some nice ones for the other mage Houses. A few you’d probably like, all forests. I think only one or two have serious beasts like the Deep Wilds or the Night Lands though. Let alone something like Faerie.” His personal theory was that all the portal worlds that had any significant presence had already broken through to Earth. It didn’t seem a coincidence that, aside from certain exceptions, all the portal worlds he found were small and barren, relatively speaking.

“We’ll stick with the Deep Wilds and the moon for now,” Chester said. “There’s no emergency.” Callum nodded agreement and the two of them sipped beer for a while until Lucy and Lisa vanished into the house.

“There they go,” Callum said with a laugh.

“Well, you’re in for it,” Chester said. “I’ll give a you a warning.”

“Oh?” Callum lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.

“It takes a lot of exercise to work off those cookies,” Chester said. “Lisa’s recipe is addictive.”

Chester’s visit prodded Callum to go and finish some of the half-considered projects he’d started before the crisis. There wasn’t any reason to put things off anymore, aside from laziness and his preoccupation with the new addition to his family. The latter was a good reason, but the former wasn’t.

First, he made a permanent portal between his pocket universe and reality. After the dragon portal, he didn’t have much trouble even if it was a lot of effort. He had to buy more vis crystals, but at this point he had enough spare wealth that was not a problem.

“So what’s the plan here?” Lucy said, holding Alice and peering through the portal at the tiny island on the other side. Alex jumped back and forth through the portal threshold, from rock to grass and back again.

“Moon portal,” Callum said, watching Alex just in case he jumped too far and fell in the ocean. “I’ll buy one of Chester’s habitats and put it up by the nexus. That way there’s magic there and I don’t have to replace stuff so often, and on the off chance we lose our drones there’s a way back to our home reality. Plus, I know you love the moon nexus. I figure you’d love a space room too.”

“Ooh!” Lucy grinned, her eyes sparkling as she envisioned it. “Absolutely. If there’s enough radiation shielding we can even take the kids. Does magic heal radiation damage? Gayle will want to find out I guess…”

“All of that,” Callum agreed. “I guess for now, though, we can take a beach day.”

“Beach day!” Alex cheered, and ran off to the house to get his things.

After the permanent connection was a success and he had a permanent link to the moon, Callum finally was ready to approach something he’d promised a very long time ago. Frankly he was surprised that Shahey had been so patient, but perhaps he’d been busy with the supernatural reveal. Or maybe dragons were just so long-lived that the delay wasn’t really noticeable. Either way, Callum needed to figure out how to create portals to Earth from the portal worlds — and to whatever other universes the portal worlds bordered.

Of all the extant portals, it was Portal World Five’s connection that was, surprisingly, the most useful for that. Mictlān’s portal was too strange, the Deep Wilds was too messy. The Fae portal seemed to be partly fae magic, and of course the dragonlands portal had been opened from Earth-side. The sea portal was the only one with a useful structure to crib from, and with his existing expertise he was able to get a sense of what changes he needed to make.

Interestingly, the incoming structure, to jump from portal worlds to real universes, didn’t seem to work on the Earth side of things, whereas the outgoing dimensional portal still functioned in portal worlds. There was obviously some complexity to the higher-dimensional topology that he didn’t understand, but actually trying to map out the way all the magic and physics worked together was a job for someone else.

He used one of the more barren and useless portal worlds for testing, a stretch of orange desert sand under a dull red sky, and punched holes in various directions. Some of them led back to the starting section in Arizona, but most did not. Straying too far from the point of origin or using the initial dimensional pattern usually meant the portal attempts just collapsed, but there were a few points of congruency with some other place.

The little portal he made in the test world showed a completely different stretch of desert, sand and scrub and unfamiliar mountains. He hastily closed the portal and marked the area, but didn’t go any further than that for the moment. It might well be just a deserted region, but if it was some other inhabited world he didn’t want to kick off any potential problems by leaking magic through.

“You know, we could set up an interdimensional travel agency,” Lucy said, scrubbing back and forth through the little bit of footage there was of the portal’s destination. “We’re halfway there already. Go visit exotic magic places! Other planets! The moon!”

“It’s tempting,” Callum laughed. “I’m a little afraid of contamination though. Portal worlds are one thing, but if we break out into a normal physics universe I think we have to worry about actually running into nasty viruses or fungi or something.”

“Spoilsport,” Lucy accused him. “But yeah I’ve read enough horror stories that it’s probably best to be careful.”

“I’ll still make one for the dragons,” Callum remarked, looking over the images himself. “They can deal with that sort of thing no problem.”

“Fae could, too. Probably shifters could,” Lucy pointed out.

“One way, yeah. But not the other way.” Callum wrinkled his nose, considering the strange flora and fauna of the Deep Wilds, or the weirdness of some of the fae. Not something he’d want to unleash on an unsuspecting world. The dragons, at least, showed they had a respect for the fragility of alien civilizations.

“Now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure you’re right,” Lucy said. She frowned thoughtfully. “Did this place have magic? Pretty sure contamination wouldn’t be an issue if it did.”

“I couldn’t tell,” Callum admitted. “I didn’t want to mess with it overmuch. I’ll do more investigation with the dragons, just in case there’s issues.”

Shahey was enthusiastic about it when Callum called him up. He still had his gym business in Tanner, with that particular version of himself still anonymous. The dragons in general had seemed to make out well, aside from all the pestering they were getting from fantasy enthusiasts. And certain quarters of the internet, but that was inevitable. It turned out that most governments were quite happy to deal with people of nigh-infinite wealth.

“The more options we have, the better,” Shahey told him, his voice coming through an ordinary phone call. “Even if you open up onto some deserted world or an airless iceball we can probably use it. There’s always something to be learned, and if it’s a different reality entirely there might be some tricks we can adapt. New physics is fun.”

“That’s not a phrase I thought I’d hear,” Callum remarked, shaking his head at the strangeness of dragons. “I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be hit another reality with the size of your portal world. But we can give it a shot.”

“We’ll be ready when you are,” Shahey said. “We’ve put some thought into how to properly protect portals now.”

“Yeah, I saw what you did for the Deep Wilds.” He actually hadn’t seen what was going on with the dragonlands portal since that one had been entirely enclosed by a vis-dense fortress. The mana came out, but even he wouldn’t find it easy to infiltrate the layers of metal and stone built up over the island. The Deep Wilds was less heavily protected, but there was still protection around the actual magical framework where it hung in space.

It had been a while since he’d done any work inside the dragonlands proper, and the dragons had built a little train system along the surface of the great cliff. Or more likely, simply magicked one into existence, since it was clearly there solely for conveying his drone around to various test sites. The car shot along the rails at a hundred miles an hour or more, carrying the drone to big metal spheres anchored in the infinite cliffside.

At each stop Callum tested both of the dimensional portal types, trying to punch a hole either back to reality or deeper into the portal world space. While he’d done a little bit of testing before, it hadn’t gone very far before he’d had to deal with other things. Now that he had all the time in the world, he could actually be thorough about it. He even had the time to recharge the vis crystals between tests, only doing a couple attempts each day.

It was no surprise to Callum that most of the endless cliff didn’t lead anywhere, the portals just collapsing when he tried. Considering that the portal world seemed to be transfinite, or at least larger than a planet, actually stumbling on a location that intersected some other place would take some real luck. Unless the destinations were infinite too, but that wasn’t a thought process Callum was going to go into very much. Infinities stopped making sense pretty quickly.

Surprisingly, after only a couple weeks of on-off experimentation, he did open a portal to a different reality. He popped a drone through and a single glance at the feed showed him that it was definitely not Earth. The sky was greener and there was a massive band stretching from horizon to horizon: a planetary ring. The surrounding foliage was green, but absolutely alien, forgoing the usual thin leaf shape for stretched balls that looked almost half-melted.

The opening was at the base of a cliff, and while Callum didn’t see any signs of intelligent life, complex plants were a good baseline. Interestingly, it did seem like the universe was one without magic. Mana poured through the portal, but it spread out and began dissipating into the environment very quickly, like water into sand.

“Found one,” Callum said over the line to Shahey. “Why don’t you take a look, see what you think?”

Instantly a swirl of mana and vis condensed in the metal box anchored into the cliff face, and Shahey’s avatar appeared. He peered through the dime-sized hole in the middle of the empty room, and then another insane expenditure of vis manifested a second avatar on the other side. The second one was, at least to Callum’s viewpoint, absolutely hilarious as it was no more then three feet high, a tiny lizard-man that looked around and sniffed the air and kicked at the soil.

“Seems good,” the Shahey on the far side said. “Nothing too bad here. We can deal with the quarantine.

“Right,” Callum said. “Here we go.” He tapped into his vis crystals and tore open a massive hole between dimensions. A thirty-foot portal was still a hell of an effort, even with all his practice and with magical batteries to take up most of the slack. The moment it was open Shahey surrounded it with mana-conductive metal shaped exactly to the three-dimensional structure of the portal. The inner ring, multiple stabilization rings, the feeder vortices splaying out from the outer surfaces to inhale the local mana, everything was almost instantly cast in a permanent mold.

“Okay, that’s impressive,” Callum admitted. “I might have to ask for that for mine.” It wasn’t exactly an enchantment, it was more like the structures were armored, allowed to flux and spin without giving anything the chance to interrupt it.

“That can be arranged,” Shahey said, the mini-Shahey dissipating now that the portal was open in full. Callum would still have to manage it until the mana took over, but it’d be a faster process than the first time he’d made a portal for the dragons. The mana-conductive support helped, as did the fact that this time the initial structure hadn’t nearly fallen apart.

Over the weeks that followed, Callum opened a few more permanent portals. One was from the Deep Wilds back into Earth, to be positioned as a connection between Chester’s Deep Wilds base and his moon base. Another was a second alternate-universe connection for the dragons to yet another reality, and two others were for Houses who wanted permanent connections back to Earth.

He tried to ignore the slow roil of the political issues between Earth and the various supernaturals as much as possible. The only time he’d be necessary would be when The Ghost had to step in, which didn’t happen too often now that the powers-that-be were against conflict. Which wasn’t to say he was completely out of it.

Despite all the agreements, a small group of breakaway mages from one of the Chinese houses decided to set themselves up as warlords in a rural district in Mongolia, and Taisen brought in The Ghost to neutralize them to prevent collateral damage. Callum didn’t even need to kill anyone, he simply needed to hose the quartet down with anti-mana enough that they couldn’t do more than voice complaints. Taisen came by to collect them with people from the main branch of the House, and Callum very much doubted they’d be treated gently.

Later in the year, a multinational interest hired a private military company to kidnap some shifters. While shifters were far more robust than humans, they weren’t invulnerable, especially those who were lower in the hierarchy. At the same time, they were still supernaturals and neither the mercenaries nor their employers knew what they were dealing with.

The Ghost evacuated the shifter families out from under the noses of their captors, and then opened the path for Chester and Felicia to take care of the soldiers. The fallout of that was significant, since there was very concrete proof and witnesses as to who wanted supernaturals for their own private purposes, and why. There were some nations that failed to extradite the masterminds, but they found themselves cut off from supernatural trade and support.

Considering how long supernaturals lived, Callum was pretty sure that policy wasn’t going to get reversed anytime soon. In fact he wouldn’t care too much if the people in question ended up mysteriously committing suicide or the like, given how transparently guilty they were, but he wasn’t getting involved himself. It wasn’t his business, and The Ghost only had one role. Getting involved in the ever-present morass of politics was not it.

As Alex started attending actual magic classes, Callum sat in because he’d never had the background himself. Most of it wasn’t helpful to him either, because so much focused on the bubble method, but he took notes anyway. He also didn’t quite trust mage teachers, even if it was a House Hargrave tutor, so he wanted to be on hand in case any of the old attitudes toward so-called mundanes leaked through.

Once they passed into the depths of summer, Lucy suggested a cookout, and Callum agreed. In a way it hadn’t been all that long, but several months without needing to worry about anyone trying to hunt him down or hurt his friends or allies had been relaxing in a way he didn’t know he needed. Ever since that day in the gym, he’d been on guard against supernatural authorities of one type or another, but all that was gone. There was nobody out for his blood — or at least, if someone was he had plenty of protection and powerful allies.

The invitation turned into an actual barbeque; shifters really liked cooking, and since Callum lacked the correct apparatus for anything more than grilling Chester brought his own. Not to mention coming an entire day early to get it started. Callum had to get extra outdoor furniture to fit everyone, since somehow it turned out there were more people than he’d expected.

The Connors and their kid came from Florida, and Chester and Lisa came with some of Alex’s friends and their parents, along with the people he knew from Winut — Arthur, Jessica and Gerry, and Clara and her parents. Gayle, Glenda, and some of the Hargrave household, though not Archmage Hargrave himself. Ray and Felicia even showed up, which was a surprise considering that she was busy dealing with her own kingdom and it was just a barbeque, not an official gathering.

It was a far cry from sitting in his back yard, practicing magic in secret.

“So what does House Wells intend to do now?” Gayle asked once all the food had started flowing from grills and smokers, using telekinesis to hold up some barbequed ribs rather than getting her fingers messy. Which probably wasn’t really in the spirit of barbeque, but Callum wasn’t going to complain. Especially since he started doing the same thing.

“I’m not sure House Wells needs to do anything,” Callum remarked. “It’s just the four of us for now, and providing a new portal world once in a while is enough to keep us in the black for a very long time.” Now that they were being offered for public sale and not just to mage Houses, even with a number of restrictions and a fixed price, there was essentially no limit to how much money he could make.

Most of that money was being reinvested by Lucy, because stacks of cash sitting around was useless, and he was happy enough to leave it to her. If most of the investments were in supernatural businesses, that was fine with him. It wasn’t like their bank account was lacking.

“You can’t just hang out having barbeques for the next hundred years,” Gayle pointed out. “Okay, I guess you could, but I think you’d get tired of it.”

“Ha.” Callum chuckled, watching Alex get absolutely smeared with barbeque sauce. “Well, I’ve got my family, and I’ve still got to learn how to be a half-decent mage. I know like five tricks, and that’s it. My enchanting repertoire has expanded a bit, but there’s still so much I don’t know, and stuff I don’t know how to even start figuring out.”

“And most spatial knowledge rests with Archmage Duvall,” Gayle noted.

“Yeah, there’s that. I don’t think she’s going to be happy to see me anytime in the next forever,” Callum said.

“I’m sure she’ll get over it in a decade or two,” Gayle said. “It’s not like your Houses are really competing, except for portal and teleport enchantments maybe. But you’re not willing to go out with House teams, nor can you stabilize space, so there’s plenty of room.”

“Maybe,” Callum said doubtfully, picking up his glass of lemonade and taking a sip. “I’m not too worried either way, though. She wants to ignore me, and I’m happy to ignore her.”

“We’ve got plenty of things to occupy our time,” Lucy said as she entered the conversation, returning after changing Alice. “But I have to admit it’s nice that it’s all stuff I want to do rather than stuff I have to do. Never figured I’d be retired before thirty but there it is.”

“One of the advantages of being part of a mage House is that you wield considerable resources,” Gayle agreed, then her lips curled upward in a smile. “Also that nobody can tell you what to do.”

“Yeah! I mean, look what happened to the last people that tried to tell us what to do!” Lucy laughed and Callum shook his head, somewhat amused. It might have been in bad taste to gloat, but he did have more than a small amount of satisfaction that the authoritarian GAR was gone, and the more oppressive archmages dead, intimidated, or bribed into silence.

He never would have imagined that he’d have his own private dimension after his first, disastrous introduction to magic. Callum could still remember that he was just thinking about changing his identity, learning a few things, and staying under the radar. That had definitely not happened, and despite all the stress and worry of the past few years he wouldn’t trade where he’d ended up for anything.

“C’mon dad! Let’s go play squirtguns!” Alex came running up, his face and hands a mess of barbeque sauce. Lucy took one look at him and dissolved into giggles. Callum snorted.

“Sounds good, kiddo, but I might have to throw you in the creek first,” he said, standing up. Alex laughed and ran off, with Callum chasing behind.