Monroe

Chapter Two Hundred and Thirty-Six. Pausing for a breather.

The library was still present, but Bob was disappointed by the discovery that the coffee and scone cart had disappeared. His stomach was roiling, and he'd hoped for some baked goods to soak up the acid. He supposed he ought to have considered that his mother might be present, but after a decade and change, the thought hadn't even occurred to him.

Seeing her had brought many memories to the forefront of his mind, none of them good. He'd worked hard to put his childhood behind him, but seeing her caused it all to come roaring back. He left the library and continued down the street. It was late spring in southern California, the weather was warm, and the sun was shining. He decided that he'd go for a walk, and if he happened across a place to grab a snack for himself and Monroe, so much the better.

Twenty minutes into his walk, he was startled out of his thoughts by someone calling his name. Looking up from his contemplation of what kitty-friendly delicacies Dunkin Donuts might provide, he found a tall, broad-shouldered man in his mid-thirties rapidly approaching with a broad smile.

"It is you!" The man exclaimed happily, reaching out to pull Bob into a hearty handshake. "When I saw you standing there with the cat on your shoulders, I just knew it had be you," he beamed, "what are you doing in LA? Shouldn't you be," he lowered his voice and looked around, "you-know-where, doing you-know-what?"

"I had a bit of legal housekeeping to attend to, and lawyers being lawyers, it's taking longer than expected," Bob replied hesitantly. "I'm sorry, you clearly know me, but I'm afraid I don't recall your name or how we met?"

"Bryan Walters, and to be fair, the last time you saw me," he dropped his voice even further, "I was missing both legs and arm, and I was on a ventilator."

Bryan clapped him on the shoulder, "I'm looking a lot better now, right?"

"Daddy! Who's that man? Is that a real kitty?" Bob turned to see a little girl launch herself at Bryan's leg.

"Amy, what I have I told you about running off?" The woman that Bob presumed was her mother scolded her gently as she hurried to catch up.

"I was running to daddy!" Amy replied, not taking her wide eyes off of Monroe's tail, which was swishing gently.

"This is my wife Rachel and our daughter Amy," Bryan introduced his family.

"This is the man who made daddy better," Bryan told Amy as he reached out and pulled Rachel into a hug.

Bob was not prepared. Amy launched herself at his leg and hugged it hard. "Thank you for fixing my daddy," her voice was muffled by Bob's khaki slacks as he glanced down in bewilderment.

He looked up and raised his hands. He wasn't sure what the social protocol was for this situation, so he settled for "Uhm, you're welcome?"

Rachel came to his rescue, detaching Amy and lifting her up onto her hip, while Bryan looked on with an expression that clearly expressed his amusement. "I'll refrain from the hugging, but I share our daughter's sentiment," Rachel smiled, "thank you for giving Bryan back to us."

"Happy to have helped," Bob replied. "I guess it's my turn to ask what you're doing here? I'd thought you guys were just grinding it out over there."

"Most of us are," Bryan agreed, "but some of us still have families, and while we know what's coming, it isn't here yet, and at the moment, the facilities over there are pretty basic."

"We're actually doing some shopping for that exact reason," Rachel added. "Schools out for this one," she bounced Amy on her hip, who responded by giggling, "so we wanted to stock up on a few things before we headed over for the summer."

"Are you going to be delving with Bryan?" Bob asked.

"No," Rachel shook her head, "I'll leave the monster hunting to him, I'll be watching Amy, along with a few other moms who are going over."

Bob paused to process that statement. The plans he'd made for evacuating Earth had always been a bit nebulous, but he had generally expected to place non-combatants and children in stasis. "Huh," he muttered eloquently.

Bryan chuckled. "You're not married, are you?" He asked.

"No," Bob replied.

"Didn't think so," Bryan tilted his head towards Rachel and Amy. "I don't want to be away from my family any longer than I have to be," he explained, "and they feel the same way, mostly." He grinned widely. "But why are we standing in the middle of the sidewalk? You were eyeballing those donuts pretty hard, why don't we grab an early lunch? There's a great place a couple of blocks from here."

Bob hesitated for a moment, then asked, "Do you think they'd have something for Monroe?"

Kiara Julwry took a slow deep breath, but if there was a difference in the way the pine trees smelled over here, she couldn't tell. The needles were just a bit more blue, though.

"Madam Prime Minister, the civilian liaison, Oscar Coldwell," her aide whispered.

The man striding toward her was the epitome of how the rest of the world viewed her country. The leather hat, the boots, the duster, for god's sake, the man had a bloody swag on his back. The whole lot was worn and sun-beaten, with dirt and dust so ground in that whatever colors had originally been present had all changed to shades of grey and tan.

"G'day," he greeted her affably, touching the brim of his hat.

"Good morning," she replied, shading her brow as she squinted across the field in which she'd arrived. "I understand you're the curator who will, initially, be building our Dungeon."

"Ayep," Oscar nodded, then he shocked her by pulling out a short leather tube, from which he shook out a cigarette. Lighting it with the snap of a finger, he took a long drag, then paused, noting her expression.

"Durry?" He offered her the tube.

She shook her head, and he laughed. "No worries 'bout cancer here," he assured her as he tucked the tube away. "Mate had the idea, magic up some 'bacco, dry and toast it with a bit of sorcery," he shook his head, his smile wide, "all sorts of 'vironmentaly friendly, ya bring your own pack for em."

"Course," he lowered his voice conspiratorially, "best part is, no tax man," he finished with a laugh.

When she didn't respond, he shrugged his shoulders and took another draw.

Kiara fought back a frown. She knew his type. He was trying to get a rise out of her, and the best policy was just to ignore his antics. "How far down have you built the Dungeon?" She asked.

"Finished the second floor yesterday, third ought to be done tomorrow," he replied sagely.

"At that pace, you should have the fifth floor done inside the week, which should allow us to thank you for your service to your country and turn the project over to us," she noted with pleasure.

"Hah!" He laughed at her. Laughed. At. Her. "Didn't you read nothing?" He asked as he chortled, wiping the corners of his eyes with the hand that wasn't holding the cigarette. "There's a reason locals don't take that path. You gotta be level ten, or better yet eleven or twelve before you can build out a Dungeon," he shook his head mirthfully.

"And why is that, Mr. Coldwell?" Her tone was flat, but she couldn't manage anything more civil. She hated these people. Uneducated, unwashed, and disrespectful, if the rest of the country would get with the program and stop devouring literal tons of unhealthy meat, their livelihoods would disappear, and they'd finally have to join everyone else in the twenty-first century.

Still chuckling, apparently not having caught her tone, Oscar pulled out a worn-looking pamphlet. "Bloke named Bob dropped those off, first couple days we were over," he explained genially, "he's a mate for sure, tells you what spells and skills are needed to build a Dunny. Turns out, while you can dig a hole in the ground with just the path, takes a fair bit more to have a good one."

Kiara tried not to grind her teeth. Of course, the colorful station folk would decide that the name 'Dungeon' wasn't bad enough. Why not shorten it and deride the idea at the same time?

"So," she said, taking the battered pamphlet gingerly, "two weeks then?"

"Three," Oscar contradicted, "manny there," he gestured towards the pamphlet, "says the second set of five ought to be half again bigger than the first."

"Three weeks then," she agreed reluctantly. "Don't let me delay you."

"G'day," Oscar touched the brim of his hat again and headed back toward the center of the field where rows of canvas tents waited.

She turned to her aide. "He seemed oddly cheerful for someone we basically conscripted."

"From what I understand, Madam Prime Minister, he's negotiated for one percent of all the crystals pulled from the floors of the Dungeon he's built for the first year," her aide replied.

"Fucking bushmen," she cursed under her breath.

"They're going to love this," Amanda looked down the corridor.

Both sides were lined with doors, only a few inches between them. "Only because we're calling the place Sigil," Dave grinned down at her and snaked an arm around her waist, pulling her against his chest.

"It's the only way to make sure we have room for everyone," she reminded him. "We're at five thousand for the next batch, right?"

"As of yesterday when we checked our Earth phones," Dave agreed.

"The beach was a nice break," Amanda mused as she leaned back against him. "The rooftop is nice, but there is something about the Caribbean."

"Makes me wonder if there are any tropical islands on Thayland," Dave mused.

"According to Bob, we're pretty far north, although he also said Thayland is further from the sun than Earth, and thus cooler," she replied. "It's sometimes easy to forget that we are in a completely different universe, not just on another planet."

"And this is the part where we ignore just how exactly Bob knows what he knows," Dave murmured into her hair.

"I've been fielding a lot of questions, people asking how we know certain things. Our distance from the sun is a primary example," Amanda griped. "Nothing against the military guys, but our D&D peeps are curious. There's about twenty of them who are deadset on recreating a spelljammer," she giggled and twitched as Dave nuzzled her neck.

"Not to mention the two guys who want to terraform the moon," she finished.

"Forget about those two," Dave lifted his head and squeezed her gently. "I've got two dozen, all curators, who have a very detailed plan for terraforming Mars." He shook his head. "From what I understand, they might very well be able to do it."

"The geek shall inherit the Earth," Amanda reminded him.

Dave snorted at that comment. "Or they'll go find another. One of the popular topics of conversation is that this whole thing proves the many worlds theory and that there has to be a way to pop across universes like hoping the bus. Just bounce around until you find an Earth that isn't inhabited, and build yourself an empire."

"An empire?" Amanda asked, reluctantly pulling free of Dave's gentle embrace. They didn't have the environmental controls online in Sigil yet, which meant that while Dave was nice and warm, she'd end up with one side being cold, which made the other side feel too hot.

"Oh yeah," Dave grinned, "they've got a plan."

Amanda thought about it for a second. Contrary to the popular image inflicted on them by mainstream media, most of their D&D players were not overweight, unshowered neckbeards with no social skills. To be fair, they often trended towards the heavy side of healthy, but that had more to do with their jobs and hobbies, both being sedentary.

D&D let people live out their hopes and dreams, playing out a story together, and the Venn diagram that showed the overlap between people who played D&D, strategy games, and idly considered world domination did tend to look like a stack of pancakes.

The thing of it was, under this System, if you had the drive, you could have the time and the power to make it happen.

Amanda had done the math. Assuming a Dragon had a natural affinity for Endurance, and they used an Endurance affinity crystal and dumped half their attributes in Endurance, because why wouldn't you, they would end up with an Endurance of over sixteen hundred. Based on what Bob had said, that meant that a tier eight Dragon, such as the King of Greenwold, who was level eighty, which was likely a few levels lower than the King of Greenwold, would have a lifespan of over thirteen thousand years.

Half that if there wasn't such a thing as Endurance affinity crystals, but still. The ability to live for millennia was mind-boggling. She had started to grasp the reasons why higher-tier species inherently treated lower-tier species as being lesser. Because they were.

"What's going on in that brilliant mind of yours," Dave asked, reaching out to hold her hands.

"I was just thinking about how people could tier up and live for thousands of years," she looked up at him with a grin. "You might want to rethink that proposal of yours, you could be stuck with me for longer than you could imagine."

"Sounds like heaven to me," Dave leaned down and gently kissed her lips.

"Harbor is deep enough, and those cliffs should provide shelter from the worst of the storms, assuming that the wind blows similarly to back home," Admiral Halston noted.

"It's the most promising site we were able to find," Ed replied.

They'd scoured the eastern and southern coasts of Greenwold, spending thousands of man-hours searching for suitable harbors. The southern coast had been a bust, but they'd struck gold in the far northwest, less than fifty miles from the glacial shelf.

"From what I understand, and remember that I'm by no means an expert, you'll need to build out a Dungeon underwater, at the far edge of the harbor," Ed continued. "That's in addition to the one you'll want to build on dry land. The monsters that come up out of the oceans here are nearly twice the level of those that appear on land, and I don't think your ships are designed for melee combat with them."

"Here there be monsters," the Admiral murmured, then he shook his head. "I've read the briefing material, and unlike some of my colleagues wearing Army green, I'm not taking it lightly. From what I understand, there shouldn't be a tide while we're sheltering here, but I won't be taking unnecessary risks."

"You'll also be the last to leave," Ed reminded him.

Admiral Halston grunted, "It's a little hard to hide a carrier group, in no small part because it's in everyone's best interest if the whole world knows where we are," he replied. "What I want to know is if you've received the answer to my query yet?"

Ed winced. "Our primary source of intelligence has become difficult to reach," he explained.

"You mean that we kicked him out of the party, and he took his beer and went camping," Halston rejoined, then waved his hand. "I read the reports, I know that your 'primary source of intelligence' is Bob Whitman and that you strenuously objected to removing him from the operations of Glacier Valley."

"I still need that answer, though," the Admiral continued. "It looks like we will have more mana crystals than we'll know what to do with, which means preparing Dungeons back on Earth should be a viable plan. It would be nice to transition back home with at least an infrastructure of Dungeons in place. God only knows what the rest of our infrastructure will look like after almost four months of dinosaur-sized monsters rampaging around."

"The idea was proposed before, but it was with an eye towards trying to hold off the tide and was shot down," Ed explained. "Why we didn't consider having Dungeons pre-built for our return..." He trailed off and shrugged. "I just don't know."

Halston clasped his shoulder. "You just need more people read in and asking questions. I can't take credit for the idea; it came from the captain of the Stennis, who was asked it by an ensign in his wardroom."

Ed could only nod. The Navy had been a bit of a sticking point when it came to disseminating information. The captain of a warship was still considered second only to God almighty himself when they were at sea, an archaic attitude given modern communications, but there it was. The result of that attitude was that the Admiralty, all of whom had commanded a vessel at one point, had insisted on briefing all of them.

Ed had known how many ships the Navy had, at least as an abstract. Still, three hundred and five men and women, all of whom had insisted on the right to brief key officers on their vessels, had caused quite a headache.

"As this meets with your approval, I'll need to share the list of alternate sites with our friends across the pond," Ed muttered, running a hand over his scalp.

"I'd actually prefer to have Her Majesty's Royal Navy docked with us," Admiral Halston said. "As well as Mexico and Canada. There is plenty of space, and with what's coming, spending some time on joint exercises wouldn't go amiss."

Ed could only nod his agreement at that statement.