I took the box of now-completed sensors back to my car, telling myself that Sarah’s joke about preferring subs was just a mildly suggestive cross between office banter and geek humor, and I was just being overly sensitive. She didn’t know I was really a man, probably wasn’t flirting with me, and almost certainly didn’t know I’d spent last night getting my cherry popped by a dominant older woman.
Well, I didn’t know if Lyris was older than me in, like, a… mental or life-stage sense, but she was an elf so she was almost certainly literally older than me.
Returning home, I unboxed the sensors and showed them to Sable.
“Ooh, that was fast. Did she rope you into helping?”
“Yeah, and she told me about gifts, too.”
She continued sorting through the sensors and sat down with a laptop, apparently registering them with some kind of data collection tool. “Right, those, yeah. It’s probably a little early for yours, though you’re a weird case. Anyway, you’ll know it when it happens.”
“So, what’s yours?”
“My gift? I’ll tell you, but you should know that witches and wizards don’t usually hand that info out to just anyone, and it’s kinda rude to ask, at least for true mages.”
“Your secret’s safe with me, I guess.”
“Well, it’s not that much of a mystery for me, really. Gifts are determined by one part nature and one part nurture, and family traditions are there in part to encourage largely the same gifts to awaken from generation to generation. The Ward family is famous for our gift. Can you guess?”
That seemed like a tall order for someone who didn’t know anything about mage culture, but I could take a stab. The Wards owned a pharmaceuticals company, sure, and I saw Sable doing a lot of alchemy. But none of the alchemy I saw her do seemed particularly unusual, or at least it seemed by the book. The focus on alchemy probably just had to do with all the rare ingredients available inside the barrier.
Or maybe it had to do with familiars? Taliornen and Lyris had seemed kind of weirded out by a lot of the Ward family practices around familiars.
The portal was also kind of unique, but I’d never really seen Sable interact with it. I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually seen her go out into the yard herself, come to think of it.
But then again, the barrier itself was kind of the elephant in the backyard. It was huge. Large scale magic. How was it powered? Who made it? It had to be the Wards, right?
“Does your gift have to do with the big barrier?”
“Bingo! Barriers, shields, abjurations of all kinds. Or to put it another way, we make wards.”
“Is that… where the family name came from?”
“No. The family name is where that word came from.”
Huh.
Sable stuffed the sensors into a backpack. “Alright, if you and Lyris could set these up before dark I’d appreciate it. I know you’ve been running around all day, but I want to make sure they’re up and running ASAP, there’s no telling when we could have another incursion. I’ll make sure you get overtime today if you go over.”
I sighed, but honestly going for another walk with Lyris sounded good. As far as I could tell she’d been sitting around all afternoon exploring an old iPad that Sable had given her to use.
When I approached, she put the tablet down, a look of concern on her face. “The internet is terrifying,” she said. I nodded. Couldn’t argue with that.
“You ready to go back out? We need to get the sensors installed.”
We went out into the backyard once more, the bag of sensors strapped to my back. The gate camera registered our passing, as expected. We used our respective enhanced movement modes to speed toward the mountain where the sensor network would be installed.
Upon arrival, I hammered a metal pole into the ground to mount the sensor on, then clipped it into place and switched it on, while Lyris did a quick fly around above me to look for signs of monsters. Without the sensor network in place, it was possible something was already in here with us, so scouting it out seemed wise.
Seeing nothing concerning, she landed next to me, and we walked the loop around the mountain, installing the other two where the waypoints on my phone suggested I should. As we walked, I broached the same topic as I’d discussed with Sable.
“So, in your world, do people with mana get magical gifts at a young age?”
“Yes, it is the same. Children that develop a mana capacity are encouraged to explore their world and interests as they please, so that they develop a gift that is uniquely their own.”
Huh, apparently they do things differently over there.
“My own gift is fairly niche, but quite useful in the right context,” she said as a followup.
“Oh? What is it?”
“I would tell you, but Taliornen made me sign a contract that restricted certain things I could tell people. That is among them. Though, you might be able to figure it out if you pay attention.”
We entered the portal cave. Relex the dog familiar was still there, but as we approached, he followed us to the portal. I gave him some pets. Good boy.
Sable had told me how to open the portal. It wasn’t actually particularly difficult or even mana intensive, but due to the size and scale of the sigil it would be hard to identify the nodes where mana should be inserted without being told. I did so, and the portal opened. We walked through, and Relex followed before running off down the tunnel on the other side.
“So what do you call this world anyway?”
“The World,” she answered, in elven. I guess I shouldn’t judge, since Earth just meant ‘ground’ or ‘dirt’. I reviewed the syllables she’d used and rolled them around in my mind. If I didn’t translate them, they came out ‘Ambar’. Not bad.
I stepped out of the cave up the side of the mountain, and got my first look at the world of Ambar. It looked like an odd reflection of the world I’d just left. The major geographical landmarks I was used to seemed to be in the same places and took roughly the same shape, but most other things were different. The trees in the surrounding forest were different, and the forest extended far beyond where I thought it should.
I could see what looked like a stone keep with a tower at roughly the same location I would expect to see the Ward compound from here. Probably Taliornen’s place. He was wasting teleportation magic on a hike that short? Well, whatever, if I had teleportation magic I’d probably use it too.
What really made things look different, though, was the lack of civilization spreading across the horizon. There were a few angular shapes and smoke plumes in the distance that suggested a settlement of some kind was present, but nothing like the sprawling grid that existed just a few miles from the Ward mansion on Earth. The stars would probably look pretty great up here at night.
I pointed out the settlement in the distance. “What’s that place?”
Lyris followed my gaze before responding, “Taliornen,” she said.
Reading my puzzled look, she clarified, “Ah, that is, my master is the local lord, and the main settlement of a lord’s domain tends to be named after them. Though, in this case it is also the only settlement in his domain.”
“I’m guessing he’s not a powerful lord, then?”
“More or less. He is concerned more with his pursuits than the expansion of his domain. The town is large enough to provide him with what he needs to support his research without making its management overly complex.”
I used a second set of GPS waypoints to lead us to and install the second set of sensors. Yes, apparently GPS worked here too, the signals from the satellites far above the Earth reaching into this plane. However, that did bring up a question…
“Hey, do our worlds look exactly the same, like, in terms of landmasses?”
To make the point of my question more clear, I zoomed out the map on my phone until we were looking at the globe of the Earth floating in space. Lyris blinked in surprise as she looked at it. She’d accepted that I had some sort of electronic map, but the idea of being able to see the entire world at once on it was apparently surprising to her.
“No… this does not look familiar. The mountain and the region around it are quite similar, but Ambar seems to diverge beyond that.”
I wondered at the implications of that, but now wasn’t the time. We finished up our work and went back to the portal. I had expected Taliornen to show up and open it for us, but it was just us at the portal.
“Uh, don’t we need a wizard to open this side?”
“No, my mana is that of a male. It is hard to work with, but I am able to activate simple emplaced wizard sigils.”
“Oh, is that because you’re a wizard’s familiar?”
“Good guess,” she said, activating the portal. We went through, and it closed behind us.
Exiting back into more familiar territory, I looked out over the familiar view of the city and outlying farms and fields. There was something to be said for the view in Ambar, too, but this was home.
Lyris looked thoughtful for a moment and smiled.
“Morgan, you have never flown, have you?”
“Hmm? A few times, actually.”
Lyris titled her head in confusion. “What? How? You do not have wings and did not have magic until a few days ago.”
I pointed at an aircraft crossing the sky at high altitude. “I’ve flown in one of those a few times.”
Lyris squinted at the object, unsure what it was. “That is… not a dragon? I have seen a few of those, but I assumed they were dragons.”
“No, it’s a human-made aircraft. Non-magical.”
“Electronics again?”
“I’m sure it has a lot of electronics, but there’s more to human technology than that.”
“Very well, you have flown in a vehicle. But you have never flown yourself, right?”
“I suppose not.”
Lyris lifted off. “Trust me?”
I had a fairly good idea of where this was going, and while I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not, my cat powers would let me fall from a fairly good height without issue, as I’d learned the hard way. I replied, holding my arms out. “Sure.”
She grinned and grabbed my arms with her talons before hauling me into the air. Those wings of hers were pretty strong. This felt pretty good, but also kinda frightening.
As we gained a bit of altitude I became worried about how high we could go. “How high does the barrier go? We’re not going to run into it, are we?”
“It goes a bit higher than this. I checked it out while trying to escape. The barrier seems to be a cylinder with a closed top. Anything blocked by the barrier feels resistance as they approach, so we will not simply hit it without warning. Probably so that birds do not hit the side and animals do not loiter near the edges.”
She flew me around a bit as we made progress back toward the house, and I looked down over the trails and terrain with interest. Then, I saw something through the trees. “Over there, something purple flashed.”
Lyris hadn’t seen it, but seemed to think it warranted investigation anyway and started flying toward where I indicated. “Let us check it out. I have a bad feeling about that…”
We landed carefully in a treetop and I indicated I’d sneak down and check it out. Assuming my animal form, I moved confidently and quietly down through the canopy until I spotted it. It was feline in form, but large, having the body of a big lion, a strange, almost human face, wings like a bat, and a tail not entirely unlike a scorpion. It seemed to be stalking around, agitated and looking for something. I had an idea of what this was but I described it to Lyris telepathically.
That is a manticore. Return to me without being seen, and remain in cat form.
I did so, noting the urgency in her telepathic voice. When I got to her, she picked me up in one talon and immediately started flying for the gate barrier.
I assume it’s dangerous?
Very. It can fly faster than I can and launch projectiles from that tail.
Not to mention being a big lion-like beast, of course. Getting away from it seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, a little while after we flew off, we heard a crashing through the treetops behind us and I looked back to see the manticore rising into the air, likely searching for prey.
Lyris was concentrating on flying. Has it spotted us?
Yes, I think so. It’s turning in our direction.
While we had a good start on it, I could tell that this beast was a lot faster than it looked, its large powerful wings projecting it at us ever faster. I watched with growing fear as it gained on us, an evil smile on what passed for its human-like face.
Lyris, if I shifted back to human form would that be an issue for you?
It would slow me down slightly.
Considering the speed difference, that thing was going to catch up fairly soon anyway.
I’m gonna do it.
I shifted back to catgirl form after she rotated me around, and she shifted her grip to account for it. I pulled out the slingshot I’d bought earlier today at the hunting store. I dug around in a pouch for some Emberleaf fruits I’d foraged and loaded one into the slingshot. Taking aim, I fired one off at the rapidly approaching monster, but missed wildly. Okay, it was my first time trying this, and these weren’t ideal conditions. The next one… also missed. It was rapidly gaining on us now, though on the plus side that did mean it was a much easier target.
The manticore flew closer and closer and it opened its disgusting maw, revealing rows of terrifying fangs, nearly close enough to bite at my legs dangling behind us. I pulled in my legs and took the opportunity to fire once more. This time the manticore was close enough that I’d be pretty embarrassed to miss it, and fortunately I hit my mark, right in its maw. The manticore reflexively shut its mouth, biting down on the fruit.
The resulting blast blew the creature’s mouth back open, leaving a gaping hole in the left side of its jaw, and it seemed to go into a chaotic fall toward the ground. We were nearly to the barrier gate now, and I wondered if we’d killed it. As we crossed the gate safely, I saw the creature emerge from the nearby foliage looking disoriented and wounded but pissed. It stalked near the barrier gate, unable to cross.
By that point, Sable had noticed our distress and had run out to the gate with a number of sigils floating in the air around her ready to use, but it seemed as though the immediate danger had passed. It couldn’t cross, and we had no intention of fighting it just now.