Monroe

Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty-Two. Complications.

Bob poured Monroe onto the table before slumping down into his chair. He'd expected to have had to have cast a half a dozen or so regeneration rituals, but Eric had brought nearly a hundred men, all of whom were in terrible condition. It wasn't just the wounds from combat, Eric had sought out what Bob recognized immediately as the homeless. Malnutrition, starvation, substance abuse, and a host of other conditions and diseases threatened to end their lives. So he'd cast the ritual over and over again, for almost two hours.

They'd been suspicious at first, but as they watched each man being restored to perfect health, those suspicions had gradually faded. One by one, after they'd been healed, they'd been led off for a shower, clean clothes, and a hot meal.

Bob knew that he hadn't exactly lived a great life, at least up until the explosion, but he could freely admit that these guys had had it worse.

It was becoming clear to him what Eric's big move was going to be. The people he'd helped tonight had been in desperate shape. There were a couple who might not have made it another week or two.

He was pretty sure that Eric was planning to disappear every single homeless or near homeless veteran that he could locate. Then he'd bring over every single combat-wounded veteran who was willing to give up their lives on Earth in exchange for a regeneration.

Mike had alluded to the fact that there were some veterans who wouldn't be coming over because they'd managed to build decent lives for themselves, and they wouldn't leave their families. Bob respected that. He respected that quite a lot.

"Thanks for that," Eric said as he sat down across from Bob, reaching out a hand to idly pet the pool of fluff that was a sleepy Monroe.

"Doing what I can," Bob replied awkwardly. He wasn't comfortable with being thanked, despite how often it had occurred over the past two years.

"So I've roped in a couple of dozen Endless and half a dozen folks from the Church of the Light," Eric began. "We're greenlit at eighteen hundred hours next Friday. The Old Guard and the Endless will focus on the extraction, and we'd like you, along with the Church of the Light, to be ready for triage if necessary and regeneration rituals if not. We have intel on just over three million disabled veterans, and we've made primary or secondary contact with two and a half million. Of those, half a million are unwilling or unable to join us at this time."

Eric took a deep breath and let it out slowly before continuing. "We're looking at a touch over two million, with five hundred thousand or so in need of immediate regeneration. Some of these people are going to be coming off life support as we move them through the portal," he warned.

"Our goal is to start with the homeless, then the ones in poor conditions, followed by the guys who are in a stable situation, and finally the guys stuck in the hospital," Eric shook his head and smiled gleefully. "If we can hold to the schedule, we should be pulling the guys out of the hospital between midnight Sunday night and o-six hundred Monday morning. All told, we're going to move a lot of men in sixty hours."

Bob closed his eyes for a moment. Two million people was an insane number. Especially considering where they were. It would effectively be the same population density as Manhatten.

"I'm not trying to be a wet blanket," Bob said slowly, "but do you have the infrastructure to house and feed two million people?"

"Not even close," Eric shook his head, "we're currently sitting at housing for twenty thousand, although by next week, if things go as planned, we should be at two hundred thousand."

"Where are you planning to put everyone?" Bob asked.

"Well, that's sort of where you come in," Eric winced. "See, we found a place that can hold the lot, flat, level, decent elevation, but we'll probably need a hundred Dungeons to keep the mana density low enough that we don't end up with monsters spawning inside of the tents."

"A hundred?" Bob whispered.

"Just single floor Dungeons," Eric hastened to assure him, "just enough of a mana draw to keep monsters from spawning."

Bob leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table as he rubbed his temples. "It takes five hours to get a Dungeon started," he said through clenched teeth. "There aren't five hundred hours between now and when you plan to bring all those people here."

"Oh," Eric replied, looking startled, "we have people who can dig out the Dungeons and do the environmental control stuff," he said reassuringly, "but no one is anywhere near as good as you are at getting the mana draw right."

Eric chuckled, "In fact, they've been having some real trouble in Glacier Valley with the mana draw from the Dungeons they built out. I'm a little surprised no one has reached out to you to take a look at it."

Bob relaxed his jaw but continued rubbing his temples. "A hundred hours of ritual casting is doable, although that's an all-day, every-day commitment for the next week. Where exactly do you plan to put everyone? I've flow around a bit of this continent, and I swear it's almost all mountains."

"On top of the glacier," Eric replied.

"So, we're starting to get some rather pointed questions," Dave observed to Amanda as he worked his way through a month's worth of emails.

"Mmhmm," Amanda replied absentmindedly as she focused on enchanting one of the bedrolls she'd gotten from Jessica.

"Got a half dozen emails asking where we are and when we expect to be back home," Dave sighed. "Mostly work-related, although I've got two from Tom, which means you've probably got a dozen."

Dave wasn't overly fond of Tom. They'd met in their Junior year, and while they'd gotten along amicably enough, working on projects together and the occasional study group, the man had developed an unhealthy attraction toward Amanda.

He would be the first to proclaim Amanda's beauty, although he would have already lauded her brilliance and her sense of humor beforehand. He'd spent a decade watching men go slack-jawed when she entered the room, and while it had been a little rough for the first year or two, he'd gotten used to it. She loved him, and that was all that mattered.

It was when the guys kept pursuing her after she'd shot them down that he became annoyed. Tom was the worst of that group. Amanda had shot him down repeatedly in the beginning, and now he just sort of hovered.

The problem was that unrequited creepy love aside, Tom was a good guy. He'd come from a family of tradesmen and had grown up learning every aspect of construction, from foundations to shingles, electrical to cabinets. He'd built on that, becoming a civil engineer and an architect. He'd initiated a project at a youth center to rebuild it as a sort of trades hall, where kids could stay off the streets and hopefully learn something useful. Though it struggled initially, it had become successful enough that some of the kids had been referred to Dave and Amanda for their networking opportunities.

He just couldn't get over Amanda. So, when she'd disappeared from social media, he'd sent an email to both of them asking if everything was alright. Two weeks later, he'd sent another. It wasn't something Dave would have worried about, except for the fact that last year, Tom had won a contract with the county, and his reach had suddenly exploded. Up until now, he'd regarded that as a good thing. Tom was working hard, using his new influence to expand his youth center project to two new locations. But now, their worry was that he could call in a favor or two, and what had been a quiet disappearance would suddenly become a whole thing.

He was tempted to pop over and shoot off an email letting him know that everything was fine, and they were just in an area with little to no internet access, but The Admirer Accord of 2012 decreed that if an unwanted admirer persisted after being rebuffed twice, both signatories would work together on all communications.

Dave didn't have nearly as many admirers as Amanda, but there had been a few over the years.

He finished reading another email asking if there was room at the next D&D event and added the sender to the list of potential candidates. It had turned out that when they'd scheduled the initial group of D&D folks to go back and settle their affairs, they'd been circumspect enough, except with their fellow geeks. While they hadn't revealed anything critical, their enthusiasm, and the fact they were clearly fucking off on some sort of adventure, had ignited the imagination and fervor of the geeks they'd left behind.

They had just over sixteen hundred requests for a slot on the next D&D weekend, as well as several offers to help fund the event in exchange for a slot. The highest offer thus far was one hundred thousand dollars and had come from a nineteen-year-old kid who was the friend of a friend of one of the people they'd brought over. He'd explained that at his first party at college, after getting drunk for the first time, he'd invested every single cent he had in his college fund on some no-name tech company. The next afternoon, after recovering from his hangover, he'd realized what he'd done. Apparently, the stock had plummeted that morning, and he was out fifty percent of what he'd invested. He'd despaired, and gotten drunk again, a pattern he continued for the next eight days until after a bit over a week, he'd sobered up enough for his daily check on the stock and saw that not only had it recovered, but it had soared. He'd invested forty-five thousand dollars, and the stock had gone from two dollars a share to just over three hundred. He'd sold it all and sworn off alcohol.

He'd offered twenty thousand dollars a head for himself and the four others that made up his gaming group.

Dave hadn't really needed the kid's life story, but it was really well written, and he'd wound up plowing through all four pages.

Those emails were fun.

What wasn't so much fun were the emails from strangers who had tracked down their emails as being the ones responsible for purchasing the plane tickets their friend or family member had used before disappearing. Everyone was supposed to have made sure that they gave out one of the several cover stories that had been concocted, but in some instances, either the story just wasn't believable due to the person involved, or someone hadn't gotten the story.

There were a dozen or so of those, and four of them advised that they had already contacted the police, two of them including case numbers as well as contact information. That was troubling.

He had no desire to be a person of interest in a missing persons case.

The best answer was to bring the individuals in question back from Thayland for a visit. The problem with that was not everyone had gone down the spell casting route, which meant that some of the changes as they'd leveled up were... dramatic. By the time you'd reached level ten or so, the natural increases to your physical statistics were slightly noticeable. Your movements were smoother, you were stronger, your muscles more defined, and of course, you almost glowed with health and vitality.

If you placed all of your attributes into, say, Endurance and Strength, you gained a herculean physique. The sort of bulky, shredded muscle that bodybuilders worked on for years. If you were a five-foot-ten chubster, for example, the change was unbelievable. There were a dozen guys who had gone down that route, working as the tanks for their groups, and none of them had been particularly buff beforehand. The two girls who had chosen that path looked like Amazonian goddesses. And three of their names were amongst the inquiries, one of them one of the girls, and that one had a case number attached.

Dave wasn't sure how to handle that one.

"And done," Amanda sighed, stretching gracefully from her seated position.

Dave put his laptop beside her and slid around behind her, where he began to work on the knots of tension that had formed in her neck.

She dropped her head forward and let out a moan of relief. "Thanks, Babe, that feels amazing," she murmured.

"I know how tense you get after enchanting," Dave replied as he dug his thumbs into a particularly stubborn knot. "And while I don't want to add to it, we had a few bombshells in our email."

"None of that right now," she muttered, lolling her neck from side to side. "The Affection Amendment of two thousand and eleven states that the only suitable topics during intimate or affectionate moments are affirmations, and food-related inquiries."

"Don't forget time-sensitive scheduling issues," Dave worked his way to her shoulders.

"Those too," she breathed.

"So, I'm guessing," Dave paused to brush a lock of hair over her shoulder and kiss the back of her neck softly, "that you did something amazing with that bedroll?"

Amanda chuckled softly, "According to Jessi, it's called a 'swag,' and I think so," she said.

"And what miracle did my brilliant," he kissed the side of her neck, "creative," he kissed the other side, "amazing Amanda work tonight?"

"Tell me more about this Amanda girl," she replied, "she sounds pretty great."

"Oh, she's incredible," Dave grinned, working his hands down from her shoulders to the middle of her back, seeking out the knots with the familiarity of long practice. "She can look at a problem and just immediately see outside of the box solution that everyone else missed. The whole room lights up when she walks in, and she chases the clouds away on dreary days."

"Sounds too good to be true," Amanda mused.

"Well," Dave conceded, "she does snore a little bit."

"I do not!" Amanda leaned back, tilting her head back to look at him sternly.

"Sure you do," Dave replied with a wicked grin. "You make these cute little mini sniffs, it's adorable."

"Those aren't snores," she protested, "we agreed that those were, at most, snuffles."

"Alright," Dave conceded, "she snuffles a bit."

"That's better," Amanda leaned forward again.

"So, what did you do with the swag?" Dave asked curiously as he continued to work his way down. He knew that she'd probably developed a large knot at hip level, just to the right of her spine. She almost always did when she sat for too long without getting up to move around.

"Well, I made it bigger on the inside, of course," Amanda began.

"Of course," Dave agreed.

"Then I used a combination of dimension and transmutation to make the mattress thicker, without actually making the mattress thicker," she explained.

"For a grand finale, I made the pockets at the head of the swag bigger on the inside as well," she finished, "so you can crawl in there, and we'll have plenty of space to change, as well as room for clothes, shoes, equipment, and if you do you're part and make with the Stasis, even a place to keep food."

"So a nicely rolled up home then," Dave surmised.

"Well, a nicely rolled up bedroom," she conceded, then looked over her shoulder at him with a smile that could only be described as predatory. "Why don't we both give it a thorough inspection?"

She completed her inspection by lunging through the rolled back canvas that led into the swag, with Dave hot on her heels.