I'd been living with Bill for about half an hour, and was already planning my escape. The bookshelf was all history and nature stuff, no fiction, and he wasn't subscribed to any streaming services, and the board games he had all looked boring and complicated. He'd shown me my new room and told me that we'd be going out soon, to do some shopping and get dinner, so now I was trying to decide if I could afford to leave my backpack behind.

It was a piece of shit, with one strap missing and the other tied back together where it had ripped. The bag itself had a wonky zipper and was covered in stains. Still... it was all I had left, unless I could get back to Universal Servicing Systems. I'd left a bunch of stuff there in one of the filing cabinets, but there was no guarantee that I'd be able to get back in - now that I'd been snagged by Paul the security guard someone might have actually taken a look and secured the place.

There was no way Bill wouldn't know what I was up to if I tried to bring it with me, though, so it was either bail immediately or wait until after the shopping trip. It should have been a no-brainer - why wouldn't I just play nice and let him buy me things? But I was still jittery from getting caught, and the idea that Bill was now somehow my foster parent was strange, and I didn't know what was expected of me. He knew me too well for me to pretend to be a pleasant, grateful child... but if I was myself he'd start regretting taking me in. Which was fine, right? Because I didn't want him to. I wanted to be in charge of myself.

Except...

It would be nice to have an actual shower, instead of using that faucet in the janitorial closet. And I'd been running out of things to pawn, and for sure was out of loose change from the desks, and I couldn't rely on the occasional burger Tony would buy for me. So. Stay for a day or two, max, and then steal some stuff to sell and get the fuck out. I wouldn't steal anything too nice, of course, because Bill was... Bill. He had always done right by me. But surely there was something around that he didn't care about.

I poked around while he had a muffled argument with someone on the phone - I'd tried to listen in, but the doors were surprisingly high quality and I could only get the tone of voice which was Bill's standard 'polite but firm' with a dash of 'for the third time'. The house was clean and... not sterile, but just sort of bland. Not a lot of art or personal stuff, although there were photographs of interesting places I didn't recognize, some for sure in different countries. I hadn't known that Bill traveled. The hall closet had a vacuum and some other cleaning stuff, and some jackets that Arizona was rarely cold enough for. Boring.

The garage had garage stuff, tools and shit, the sort of things people buy and use once and then never touch again. I could maybe steal a few of the power tools, but most of what I saw was pretty bulky. There was also a shelf with some cardboard boxes on it, and I lifted the flaps on the first one. It was filled with awards. Plaques, trophies, framed certificates. Some were baffling, but the majority stated what they were quite clearly. They were from charitable organizations, mostly, and every single one was thanking Bill for being amazing. And he'd just shoved them in a dusty box in the garage. Huh.

What the fuck made this guy tick?

I tried to fast-forward the memory, but as usual it didn't work. I could skip ahead, sometimes, and I could do slow motion, but speeding things up almost never worked. I dropped out of it and looked over at Katrin, who was making mana crystals. "I tried starting from the beginning and got caught up in watching myself be a little shit. I was casing Bill's place, thinking about what I could steal. There were probably some deeper thoughts there too, but a lot of that isn't coming through in these recovered memories. I'll know I was afraid or happy or something, but the why of it is harder to get a clear picture of."

She nodded, but continued to stare at the crystal in her hand. "I take it you didn't find anything interesting?"

"Nah. Not really. If anything I should be starting at the end and working backwards, but going in reverse is really hard. Maybe I should just start at the furthest memory I can find, but some I'm not totally certain about where they fit on the timeline. I managed to skip around some not too long ago, bouncing around memories of working with him at a soup kitchen. I explained soup kitchens to you before, right?" She grunted agreement while squinting at her mana crystal. "Anyway, it felt like there was something important I hadn't found yet, but that could still be somewhere to work on. Go to the most recent one, the one where I wasn't being cranky about it anymore and was even sort of enjoying it."

Even then, what was I going to see? Us driving home, eating dinner, me taking a shower and getting ready for bed. Maybe some nightmares. I really needed an editor, so it would be more like watching a movie. No pointless travel, no quiet moments of just sitting there picking my nose, just the plot-relevant shit. I had more than a year of lost memories to get through, I needed to figure something out. I'd been trying to search with both minds at once so I could speed it up that way, but it hadn't really made enough of a difference and it required me to force my minds out of synch which I didn't really like doing.

Flopping down next to Katrin, I pointed at the crystal. "How is this whole thing coming?"

"Pretty well," she said, "though I need practice still. Here, feel this one."

She handed me a crystal that had been sitting next to her, and I reflexively dropped it. "Shit. I was caught off guard, and some part of my brain thought it was burning me." It was actually the opposite - the mana crystal was so cold it hurt to hold.

"I should have warned you, sorry. I'm just really focused on this one. As you can see, I managed to do a good job on the cold-aligned mana, such that as the excess magical energy radiates off it's cooling anything it touches. If I could stabilize it, we could even use this to make an ice box. This next one is supposed to be buoyancy, but I don't think it's working."

Stabilizing the crystals would require her to etch runes directly into them, so that they would be locked at whatever grade they were currently at. The excess mana that it gained as 'interest' would still flow off of it, but it would never degrade to a smaller or weaker crystal. That was the theory anyway, though Katrin said that in practice she wouldn't be able to do a thorough enough job to keep it from eventually sublimating. This was more of a theoretical exercise anyway; she wasn't planning to make any magical devices that would benefit from having pre-flavored mana, and she couldn't turn them into potions since she didn't have Alchemy.

"Well," I said, "maybe when we do all the supply shopping tomorrow we can find you one of those fancy rune stylus things that works on crystals. We should also maybe get something made to grow the crystals in, I know your Mana gift lets you do it but with the battery we could be making them all the time with the excess energy we're not using. I know we don't need the money, but it seems like a waste to just leave that on the table."

She tossed the crystal she had been working on down - did it fall slower than it should? - and sighed. "You're right, it would be good to have. The runes all through the mana battery are fairly restrictive, so the maximum grade of crystal won't be as high as it could be, but it should still be more than worth doing. If nothing else, we could put some simple absorption formula on them and carry them in our pockets to slightly increase mana regeneration."

She sighed again, and I had a sudden urge to make some excuse and leave the room. I didn't want to be a good person, being a good person was hard and scary and boring. But... fine. I put a hand on her arm. "What's wrong?"

"It's ridiculous. It's just... the mana battery from Brinkmar, it trivializes so many things that I was supposed to be doing for us. That trick I learned, to pull the mana Errod wasn't using out of him to recharge myself? I got very good at it, very fast, and now it just doesn't matter. We're going to be taking the mana battery with us to Earth, and you won't even need me to move the mana around because we'll get a recharge plate added to it. And I'd also been practicing making mana gathering pools since... well, since we were in the jungle training, before the bounty hunters. Remember? That's useless now, too."

"You know I'm not the best at making people feel better, so I'm just going to be honest. You're not wrong, and that sucks. But that's only for this job - most of the time we're not going to want to be hauling that mana battery around, it's too valuable. It'll stay on the ship, with all sorts of traps and shit around it so nobody can touch it. Also, it doesn't take the place of all the cool spells you can cast. And... well, even without any of that, even if you couldn't do any kind of magic and we never ran out of mana? I'd still want you along."

She let her head lean on my shoulder. "Thanks. You're doing a pretty good job at this, actually."

"I mean, I'd keep you in the back of the groups and make you clean up after us to pull your weight, and you wouldn't be allowed to talk because servants should be seen and not heard, but I would absolutely want you with us. To make me look cooler by comparison."

Still leaning against me, she closed her eyes. "I can kill you in so many ways," she said, "and also I already clean up after you. You disgusting slob."

Eventually it was time to go and swear more binding oaths, this time to say that we wouldn't blab about anything related to the job. After some raised eyebrows our new employer shrugged and went with my version of the contract, which carved out an exception for the stuff I already knew and made the agreement reciprocal. Once it was all done and official, we retired to a private meeting room at the back of a tavern and were finally given details about the job.

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Matlyn had notecards, and seemed a little nervous. "We will be going to a place that is, um, not one of the known planes. We believe that knowledge of this plane... er, no, this... um. It would best be referred to as a planet, but of course it's different from... um. We believe that knowledge of this planet is very limited, and it is our intent to keep it that way. Ongoing contact with the native people would be very disruptive, possibly disastrous for both them and ourselves, and so we will only be going to collect samples of their plant life - especially cultivated plants. These will be carefully acclimated to our environment, and released over time."

Grunkle looked skeptical, and kept glancing around at the rest of us. He was probably desperate to argue or ask questions, but it wouldn't fit the 'wise oracle' persona he was trying to keep up. Part of me thought it would be best to act surprised, say she was crazy, something like that... but I didn't want to make extra work for myself. I could find some opening later to express doubt, for now I would play the part of an incurious mercenary.

Matlyn continued, still clearly reading off of her notes but sounding more confident. "The other planet can be reached via Nusos, however in previous exploratory expeditions it was found that there is no ambient mana. Furthermore, opening a door from Nusos was extremely difficult and used more mana than it should have, and we suspect that the return trip will be significantly worse. It would be easy to become trapped there, with no way back home. We believe that the large amount of mana moving through the planar system during the Grand Alignment, coupled with mana crystals held in reserve on our end, will allow us to bridge this gap successfully.

"That being said, staying until the Grand Alignment would not be ideal. My sister, who will be joining us soon, has traveled between this planet and our own before. She did so with the assistance of a magical artifact known as a planar lodestone, but that item is sadly not available to us. Therefore, the first part of this expedition will be attempting to obtain a replacement."

A long time ago, there had been a demigod named Batasun. He'd been some sort of prodigy at planar travel, even to planes that were supposed to be totally inaccessible - not a lot of stuff that could be verified, since after thousands of years stories tended to get all mixed up. What mattered was that after his disappearance, a cult of followers - The Eyes of Batasun - popped up that were convinced he had found the key to ascending up to the realm of the gods. All you had to do was bind all the planes together in one spot.

This had a lot of problems - some of the planes were especially hard to work with, some were extremely hostile to your continued existence, and some were just so completely different that it seemed like a bad idea to try and smoosh them together. Still, these guys tried really hard and eventually created things called planar lodestones. Each planar lodestone was tied to a different plane, and would pull it closer - it sounded a lot like what my bracer did, with the dial, although the lodestones were much more powerful.

It wasn't clear how many had been created, or how many still existed, but Zee had known someone that traveled to and from Earth with the assistance of one. Now, through a lot of research, they were pretty sure they knew where the old headquarters of this group was. The name translated to 'The Temple of Convergence', and it had been somewhere near a place called the City of a Hundred Gates. There were some old accounts of people stumbling across it, and they said there were multiple spots around the temple where the planes were still bound to each other - causing all sorts of chaos. But this was all below ground, and the temple and city both had since been covered up by time and a whole lot of sand.

It sounded like a dumb plan to me. There was no reason to think they'd left these lodestone things behind in the first place, and even if they had someone else would have already taken them. On the off chance there was something still there, it was probably completely buried and would take months of work by a whole crew - that we didn't have - to excavate everything. I didn't want to say all of that, but I had to at least ask the main part of the question. "What makes you think anything of value would still be there? If I were these guys I wouldn't have left any of the lodestones behind in the first place, but even if they did the temple would surely be picked clean by now, right?"

Matlyn nodded. "That's certainly possible, but it was abandoned due to a magical disaster rather than them just... moving away. The disaster kept everyone away for years, and during that time the city fell. The desert is harsh, and would have buried everything quickly. We believe..." she glanced at Grunkle, and he nodded, "the Temple of Convergence was outside the city walls, and mostly underground. Any looters that came would have been targeting the city itself, probably, and then by the time the lingering magic had died down enough to make exploring the temple possible it had been lost."

Okay, I could buy that. But now I had another concern. "I recently was on a job where we found some slag that was improperly disposed of, and there were all sorts of fucked up monsters. Is that going to be a thing here?"

She grimaced. Oh no. "It... shouldn't be? I can't really guarantee anything. From the one or two accounts we've found of people locating the Temple of Convergence, all of the hazards were related to effects bleeding through from other planes. Changes in gravity, the passage of time, level of entropy. Things like that. But it's certainly possible that some monsters have crossed over, or that there are spots where the mana is aligned with something other than the planes. Almost everyone that found it survived, and the most recent was hundreds of years ago - so things should be even safer now."

I was about to ask what it meant that "almost" everyone survived, but in the end it didn't matter. We'd already known there would be the possibility of bandits or the occasional monster - that's why they'd wanted someone like Errod along - and between the rest of us we could probably deal with some residual planar magic without getting killed. We just had to go slow and pay attention, and everything would be fine. I idly scratched at the spot on my chest that was now, somehow, made of plant matter, and tried not to overthink things.

We would have a few days to get supplies, and then would be on our way. The airship would have come in handy, and I was tempted to use it, but the furniture and magical appliances weren't ready yet and Matlyn was very eager to get to Earth the second we'd finished poking at the lost temple. She wouldn't want to fly all the way back here, and I didn't want to leave the airship somewhere that other people might fuck with it - even if I was taking its power supply with us.

That led to a conversation with Sige. "Sige, I need a favor. Can you keep living here for a while and feeding Shitheel? This job might take a long time."

"Can you leave me money for moskar food? And maybe for some U'rmun food?"

I raised an eyebrow at him. "Can you resist the urge to turn that money into gambling debt?"

For a split second he looked offended, and then seemed to actually consider it. "Well. You could buy some fucking dry goods in bulk, it's not like I'm going to sell it or anything."

"Deal. How is your hand?"

"Getting better, I think. It's taking its sweet fucking time, though." He stared at his hand, and flopped it around. "Hey, we should have another party tonight. The last one got fucked up by you getting almost assassinated."

"Uh, maybe. Yeah. I have to do some shopping for the job tomorrow, so don't let me get too wasted. I don't know what to even buy, and we're probably going to have to carry shit around on foot across the wilderness and then when we go to the next location it'll be worthless which means just... dumping it, I guess."

He flopped his bad hand at me, dismissively. "Cost of doing business. Unless you want to learn to open Biltagiretzae, since you're officially a planar traveler now."

I'd heard of Biltagiretzae before. In fact... I'd been there. In the original timeline. Someone had opened the way for me, and it was just this... perfect cube of metal walls. "Right, yeah. That's the storage place, right? Why didn't I see you and Cyne using it, if it's so handy?"

He shrugged. "I suck at it, personally. It takes me hours of concentrating to open it up. Cyne is faster, I saw him do it once in like half an hour while we were on the road, but it's a plane that you have to specialize in if you want to be able to use it easily. And anyway, on your Duminere job there wasn't really a need. From what I've heard it's super hard to open from the Necropolis, and we had the wagon before that, and then the job was done. Plus the fucking wards around most cities keep you from opening it, so you have to go outside and just sit on a rock concentrating for an hour or whatever. I'd rather fucking carry a backpack. But for a one-time thing when you'd have to be throwing away gear? It's probably worth it."

"You could have put that ancestral blade in there, since it felt so bad to carry around."

He made a face just from thinking about it. "Nah, you don't put valuable fucking loot in there - especially not on a job. If you die, it's basically impossible for anyone to get to your old domain so that shit is just lost. Personal use only, and nothing you want to pass on to your kids. Although, now I'm wishing I'd put that blade in there and left it to rot."

"I'm surprised it still worked. Aren't ancestral blades supposed to be empowered by... I don't know, the Common Local Understanding or something? If it was sitting in that vault for hundreds of years, most people must have forgotten about it."

"Nah. That's part of it, sure, but there are plenty of stories of a sword getting some kind of power when it's involved in some important event, whether or not anyone is watching. Could be the fucking gods, could be spirits, could be some mysterious other thing nobody fucking understands. It's the same reason you can't force it - people who try to fake some big event, no matter how many people are watching it'll never make their blade special. But they say Storm killed the guy that offed his dad with his dad's sword and that was all it took. The sword wasn't super old, nobody was looking, but it was just... fuck, I don't know, I think maybe one of the gods likes stories."

That was interesting news. "Any relation to the Knights of the Storm?"

"Don't think so. He founded the Coastal Alliance, he was a famous ship's captain and monster hunter. Fucking badass."

I dimly remembered Katrin, Errod, and Mila taking a delivery to the Coastal Alliance, to a town called Storm's Anchor. Probably named after him. "Okay, well... I'll get party food for tonight, and a bunch of oatmeal and shit for when I'm gone so you don't blow the grocery money on hookers and blackjack," he looked confused at that, I hadn't even attempted to translate those words, "and just let me know before we leave if there's anything else you need."

He pointed at the ceiling, above which we could hear Shitheel pacing. "Moskar food. And if you want me to teach you how to get to some other planes, like Biltagiretzae so you can stash your shit, you also have to buy me a big case of Juicerinds."

Juicerinds were extremely drippy melons, so much so that you could probably just make a hole for a straw and slurp out the insides. They were also both sour and bitter, like an under-ripe grapefruit, and had a strange cinnamon-y aftertaste. I was not a fan. "Gross, but okay."

I turned to leave and heard Sige mock whispering behind me. "They grow up so fast, don't they? Seems like just yesterday she didn't know shit and I had to keep stopping her from dying."

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