Mage Among Superheroes

Countries were too big. That was my official opinion. New Bay was nice because it was densely packed with people, so villains were never more than an hour away… assuming you could avoid traffic. Here in Linduel they could be anywhere, and the place was way larger. Much of the trouble was focused around Entheas and the dukedom that Ruvyn represented- or at least that was what we were exposed to- but the place was bigger than New Bay. And we didn’t have any cars. Or buses. Or subways, though if you didn’t count flooded ones then not all of New Bay did either.

It didn’t help that all the underground tunnels we’d been going through were natural instead of constructed, as that made them much less efficient at getting people places. We’d spent so long walking back and forth… and while a little walking wasn’t that bad, some of our trips had taken over a day. I wasn’t really fond of trying to camp in tunnels patrolled by enemies. I liked fighting, but I didn’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night.

Having found one portal, we arranged to receive additional signaling devices and also to drop off weapons that should not remain. The ones we weren’t using, of course. There was no reason to hamper our own options, after all. Lasers were still good, especially if the enemy wasn’t expecting them.

We sent a message through Sending and received a confirmation that they would be ready later in the day. People had watches synced to New Bay time still, so nobody should have to stand around waiting. But we were sent a generous estimate just so they could be sure to be ready.

Gate was a pretty expensive spell, after all. Missing an opportunity would require another Sending to coordinate and along with the Gate itself that was 30 mana, which was about three hours of regeneration. I would have thought elven lands would have better than standard mana regeneration, but that didn’t seem to be true to any significant extent. Split between Midnight and myself it wasn’t so bad, but even so it was inconvenient and prevented us from doing other things with that mana. Like Scrying for enemy locations.

The drop off ended up going just fine, and given the limitations on Scrying we probably could have afforded to wait… but it would have at the very least limited other training throughout the day. I had a lot of testing to do with Multicasting.

-----

Midnight and I were back at Clear Moon Lake to try to do some Scrying. Even if it was a pretty good Scrying lake, it still didn’t have the carefully controlled conditions I would like.

It seemed to be better at night, at least. The images had been a bit dull during the day.

We had to wait for some elves to finish their turns, looking for… something. Enemies, probably. We weren’t supposed to look, but it was a huge lake so it was difficult not to. Mostly we were standing at a terrible angle and thus couldn’t make anything out.

These elves should get them a good old Scrying orb. You could just put those inside and use them whenever you wanted! But I understood that people did a lot of dumb things because of tradition. The full moon had somehow been slightly better, but I hadn’t refamiliarized myself with the specific portal signatures I was looking for so I ended up stuck on random things again.

I was worried the same thing would happen again, but fortunately the image resolved into something. That something happened to be a distorted image of a portal with rocky surroundings and nothing more of note. It reminded me that sometimes I’d gotten much more zoomed out images of the surroundings, instead of just ten or fifteen feet in around a point. Specifically when I got locked in on cities. I tried to adjust what I was looking at and…

A wave suddenly crossed the lake, scattering the image and breaking the spell. Wow, what a horrible coincidence. No, wait, perhaps the wave was a side effect of it breaking to begin with. Seriously, if we had an artificial construct I wouldn’t have to be dealing with these issues. We couldn’t even get a good recording of the lake!

So annoying. But I was ready to try again. “I tried to zoom out to city scale,” I explained to Midnight, as he would be interweaving attempts of his own. “That broke the spell, but I know it’s possible to see in general.”

“Do you think it’s due to wards?” Midnight asked.

“I didn’t feel the same sort of resistance. But I’d assume there are some around.”

In theory, Clear Moon Lake was valuable for pushing through Scrying blockers, but I didn’t really have data to back it up. So we were going off of trust, which was fine I supposed.

I gave it another attempt, getting a few moments of a vague city shimmering into view. Midnight swapped with me, and after going back and forth a few times we got some decent footage of an underground city. I wanted to turn up the brightness on the Scrying because darkvision didn’t necessarily work with recordings, but sadly the lake didn’t do well with adjustments.

“We’ll have to do some post-processing,” Midnight said. “But maybe someone here can recognize it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Though I don’t think we’re up for any sort of city-sized expeditions at the moment. And we don’t know for sure that city is connected to the portal we saw, or the relative position within if it is.”

Scrying did give us a vague sense of direction where our target was, so that might be enough to find the city. But again, we shouldn’t be trying to attack a city with a dozen people- and it was highly unlikely that an army could just walk up to it even if the elves had been prepared.

“See if you can try to tune out that particular portal,” I commented. We had enough mana left for one try each. Then our turns would be up, though we also had a time limit. We just happened to be under it because our spells kept falling apart.

I followed Midnight’s flow of magic as well as I could, just in case he managed something extraordinary. What we saw when the shimmering mists of Scrying spit apart was… Entheas. Again.

Midnight just gave me a look. We’d seen the elven city come up several times, and while so far we hadn’t conclusively proven that we were latching onto cities because they actually had portals- it could have just been large amounts of magic interfering- it was notable.

“Your turn,” he said. “What are you thinking to try?”

“Well,” I paused for a moment. “I’m thinking that I’d rather not make the duke angry or expose us to some sort of secret society who’d be mad if we found a portal,” I said.

“... So you’re just going to give up?” Midnight asked.

“Of course not,” I said. “I’m just going to try something else. Malaliel!” I called down the angel. She was helping us record the lake. She could get a much better angle, though it wasn’t perfectly steady. Perils of winged flight and all that.

“Are you finished now?” Malaliel asked.

I shook my head. “Just one more thing. But I need you to record this instead,” I said, pulling out my phone. “I’m going to try a trick.”

She gave me a look, but shrugged. Sometimes, trying things resulted in finding out something simply didn’t work. That was fine. Other times, it ended in complete disaster- but what was the worst that could happen here, my phone broke?

Okay, maybe the lake could be damaged somehow, but I doubted that would be easy.

I concentrated on the lake, but I didn’t want it to show anything. If it was a good focus for Scrying magic, I’d gladly make use of it. But I also didn’t want to advertise what I was doing to everyone hanging around.

The waves rippled on the lake in front of me. Fog swirled, but revealed nothing. In my hand, however, they parted to reveal something as I pushed through stiff resistance. I knew where I was trying to reach, but it was difficult. I only slowly pushed back the edges to reveal a circular portal- not freestanding, but in a constructed archway.

“Well, doesn’t look like it leads to Earth,” I said. “It’s certainly not a Doomsday-style portal.”

Through the portal I could see twisting caverns, trembling for some reason. Maybe that was my magic trying to pierce through the wards. Though it might be the tunnel I saw ahead, as there was a river on the wall. And on the other wall. Where was that again? I’d have to review.

The image didn’t last long, however, as my mana was quickly used up wrestling with whatever was trying to stop me from seeing that portal. I sighed. “I should have also focused on the right portal signature.” I would have said more, but people were watching. They might have seen us huddling around oddly, but at least the lake hadn’t displayed any big secrets.

-----

“So where was that?” Malaliel asked.

“Unfortunately, since that was an image of a portal instead of the portal itself,” I shrugged. “We were missing a lot of context. Can I look at the recording?” My phone had been displaying it- but only as a reflective surface. A screen recording couldn’t pick that up because it didn’t go through the electronics.

Malaliel showed me the display on the camera she had been using. “Here it is.”

Aside from the edges of the portal, the screen was just black.

“Can you turn up the brightness?” I asked.

“This is it,” Malaliel said. “As bright as it gets.” She slightly adjusted things until the edge of the portal washed out the image, but that was all we could really get.

“I couldn’t see anything but the portal,” Midnight commented.

“So no natural light, then. I was quite focused on the magic so I wasn’t looking as well as I might,” I said. “But it did look like I needed my darkvision. Malaliel?”

“I was able to see dark tunnels and rivers flowing opposite each other on the sides,” she commented. “My vision is also supernatural. Whereas Midnight, you see in the dark through reflecting what little light there is, correct?”

“That’s right. So when there’s actually no light, it doesn’t work,” he said. “The portal made some light on the edges, but it didn’t extend through.”

“Too bad there wasn’t any sound,” I said. “All I can confirm is it had to be an outer plane. They do weird stuff with gravity.”

“The outer planes being…?” Malaliel prompted.

“Oh you know. Heavens and hells, mostly,” I said.

“What are the chances that that was one of the heavens?” Malaliel asked.

“Uh… they could have a spooky tunnel based heaven I’m not familiar with. Underground, I mean. They all have pretty much perpetual light aboveground. And some probably don’t have an underground, but I’m not aware of every aspect they have.” I paused for a moment. “Oh, they totally sealed off Elysium though. So it’s not that, unless it’s a portal to a different Elysium.”

“I get what you’re saying,” Midnight said. “So… which hell is it?”

“It might not be a hell,” I said. “There’s also the abyss and some other weird stuff.”

“But it’s not one of the good planes,” Malaliel confirmed.

“It is not,” I said with confidence.

“So what do we do about it?” she asked.

“... Why would we do anything about it?” I asked. “I didn’t see any lasers there. That’s local business to deal with.”

Malaliel gave me a look.

“Obviously we’ll inform Sir Kalman,” I said. “He can figure out if that’s the surface elves causing trouble for themselves or some sort of invasion thing.”

“I would have assumed you would have insisted on dealing with it,” Midnight said.

“Why? It’s not like monsters were pouring through. If it was any of the really bad places everything would have already fallen apart, but there’s a stable portal and Entheas still exists. It could just be a place to dip people into other planes,” I said. “You know, as part of the elite conspiracy of people with fully unlocked classes.”

Midnight’s tail swished. “Still thought you’d be eager to deal with that speculative group.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked. “I’d have to at least know Meteor Swarm first.”

Midnight frowned. “You just checked to see if you have enough points to learn that, didn’t you?”

“I might have. But I didn’t spend them.” I would want to be able to test it and I didn’t think there was anywhere that would let me do that.

“Should I ask?” Malaliel said.

“They’re not actual meteors, obviously,” I replied. “... Though I wonder if that would be possible.” Maybe I could open a Gate? That seemed like a terrible time for everyone involved. There was no way I could be far enough away.