Someone in Darkmoor had been messing around with anti-matter, and it had gotten away from them.
That required some serious scientific advances. No wonder Darkmoor was so legendary, if it had so rapidly advanced to that level… and just like had happened with magical idiots, it had gotten away from them.
Welp, I couldn’t do anything about that, unless I was prepared to severely fuck up the timeline, which I was trying very hard NOT to do. Within this Inn, the timestream was in a flux all of its own, but if I went outside without somehow being acclimated to the time, I’d just be wiped.
I didn’t know if reaching the start of the loop would do the job, or if I’d have to just bounce back to the future. Time travel theory was not my specialty yet.
In the meantime, I had a month of being alone in a high-radiation environment to look forward to, replacing my Protection from Radiation every eight hours or so. I was just going to have to tie off the Slots and see what else I could occupy myself with.
My company would be fine. I’d used a touch of Divine magic in the Flesh to Stone, so they were vaguely aware of time passing, and being brought out would be much less traumatic than a hostile spell. They’d come out, be mentally ready almost instantly, and be ready to bail.
That is, if the Portal formed. If it wasn’t… I was trapped here with them until it did. Which… wasn’t too awful bad if I could tolerate the loneliness.
I could always bring Duum out. I had him bound up in a Figurine of Familiar Power, so he was basically in a containment space and stasis until I got to where I needed to. I would have brought him out if I hadn’t picked up help by now, but saw no reason to burden him with all this fighting and probably alarm everyone even more.
At least I heavily doubted I would have to worry about any incursions during the next month. I was pretty sure that anything that couldn’t get inside and underground was dead, and that meant no wandering monsters were going to find this place and take shelter here for some time.
I looked out the window at the slowly fading grandiose fireball of the fusion explosion, and wondered how long it was going to be before the Portal showed up.
Well, no time like the present. I still carried a fortune in gemstones to Burn up, and had the items to spend it on, so I could stay busy every day with that for a time.
Other than that, it looked like I was going to be doing a lot of spell research into Runeforms. I was very glad I’d looked through all those libraries that I could, and had committed them to memory.
Actually… I looked around in sudden interest.
One of the dangers of Zanzyran Rune Magic was feedback from Nature if you failed. Messing with fundamental Names could result in backlash from reality itself if you messed up, and it was remarkably easy to mess up. Higher-level abilities resulted in more backlash…
But where was I? I was inside an isolated instance of Time. The world was outside, not in here. Any backlash was going to be heavily mitigated by the fact there was very little Nature in here to respond to it.
And… even if it did spread outside, so what? I was literally in a radioactive wasteland now. I didn’t know how long it would take to thin out, but nobody was going to come by and bitch me out for starting a raging storm here. There wasn’t anything around left to complain, unless they were way underground, like my own ancestors here were, fleeing like wise mice back into the safety of the stone from the monstrous fallout of idiots playing with technology in a magical world and not knowing what they were doing.
I could get in a bunch of Rune research, harvest the Karma of discovery, and use it to fuel me to the next Circle of Runecrafting.
Training time. If I wasn’t running around doing stuff actively to gain gold and Karma, all I’d have would be training time.
Well, I could make use of training time. The reason I’d time-hopped in the first place was so that I could make more time out of nothing. Research was a bottomless hole of time and effort, the primary duty of most of my Simulacra.
I took a look around the place, especially at the vivid white spots and heaped remains of the undead and their belongings, and began to make plans as I first investigated my spoils.
To my utter lack of surprise, the alien lich had a Portable Hole on him, and therein carried pretty much all of his worldly belongings, the sign of someone who didn’t trust even this isolated a hiding spot, but wanted his comforts available wherever he was.
He had unpacked some of his belongings upstairs in the master bedroom, too, boxes of what turned out to be assorted arcane tomes, and spellbooks I assumed were looted from his victims, some of whom had been turned into his attendant undead.
I had hit him hard enough to burn out a personal force-field from a technobelt among his remains, a Greater Contingent Harm spell meant to heal him back to full Health, Resonated through his Spell Turning, and had still overwhelmed his Health twice over. I had consumed his link to his phylactery and destroying it with his soul, which was now hopefully somewhere very bad indeed, if the private records on his personal datapad were to be believed.
He probably would not have believed that I could do something as absurd as Exemplar Surge for technomancer spells, of which Password was one such. The algorithm to enter the datapad was fairly complex if you didn’t know math and the underlying reference points, but Password provided all of that, and lo, the elfin with the 46 Int didn’t have a problem calculating the proper digits to input.
His Portable Hole had multiple examples of technological devices in prime condition, too, kept as heirlooms or cherished treasures, some of them torn down for parts or salvage, or maybe frustrated attempts to build something that could replicate those parts, so that he could start rebuilding the technological society he was familiar with.
Unsurprisingly, there was no global datanet around I could tap into, but the datastores he had with him held a wealth of information regardless. The idiot just didn’t have the patience and willpower to get through them all and gain the fundamental training and skills, then do the long and laborious foundation work to actually rebuild things as he wanted to.
Basically, he wanted a techno-printer to pop up and make all the stuff so he didn’t have to, and it seemed his physical skills and patience just weren’t up to the task. He’d maybe gotten up to the early computer age/industrial level tech, and kept flubbing up and getting frustrated as he tried to keep the cycle of technology, research, build, achieve, research, build, achieve going, and instead had opted to go have fun with this wild and crazy magic stuff, where pretty much anything seemed to be possible.
Except, of course, making new video games, and getting off this world for someplace else in the Federation. It seemed that magic was not known anywhere else in the vast region of space controlled by the Federation, and even using Wishes wasn’t able to reach out and grab things from distant planets, or transport himself there.
He’d tried. He’d tried a lot.
His notes on gammathauma radiation indicated that it was radiation leakage from the power core of the Barhund mixing with the local magical field to empower it in unusual ways… ways that, when he gleefully overused them with his entirely self-excused abandon, infected him with a permanent form of radiation poisoning and tissue damage that no magic had been able to remove at all. He’d Bodyjumped three times, stealing the lives and bodies of others… and the energy had just followed him and his magic into his ‘new lives’, rapidly infecting him and bringing back the agony.
The pain had grown so great that he’d actually chosen lichdom just to escape the agony of it. While his body was still infected with the stuff, even after jumping to a new one, as an undead he didn’t even feel the pain, despite the glowing radiation still eating away at him.
Vivus seemed to have taken care of that problem entirely.
I reflected that I had a lot of reading material here, terabytes of information and more, although a lot of it was likely useless social network crap or popular culture stuff at least fifteen hundred years out of date now.
Divining what this twat was using for a base in his reconstruction efforts out there probably wouldn’t be all that hard, but naturally I couldn’t go out there.
Would they still be there after another two thousand years? Well, at least I knew what to look for.
Hah, I could probably play some video games four thousand years old and enjoy them…
P+1 months…
My time was more or less divided evenly between working on Gear, doing private research on additional Runes and control of said Runes, and going through the information resources of Third-Class Computer Maintenance Technician Benny Horst treating this world as his own fantasy RPG to use and abuse as he wished for over a thousand years, at least once he managed to make archmage.
He’d never run into an elven archmage, only elves who took the warrior-centered approach, and such simply were no threats to him. His overconfidence, my new magic, sussing out his protective spells, and of course being really, really good against undead all helped me out.
On the other hand, absolutely nobody was going to miss him, so there was that.
The full moon was rising in a few minutes, and I was prepared to release everyone from petrification the moment the Portal opened and get them out of here.
There was still a radiation problem here, and would be for years. It was entering through cracks and flues, would be doing so when things breached the doors and left them open, and would linger for a long time, although much of it seemed to have dissipated at our previous drop-time.
However, it was also messing with the temporal fields about the Inn itself, a mass and a mess of gammathauma radiation still in the air.
Above and behind me, magic shifted as the moon rose, and the manafield responded to its brightness, lighting up the night in the churning sky, somehow managing to turn it a vaguely bloody red with all the dust and ice up there.
The enchantments of the Inn around me shifted and twisted, but did not have the cohesiveness or power to gather together and access the temporal loop that was the ultimate power source of the Inn’s magicks here.
No Portal meant no exit from the Inn.
I exhaled softly as I lowered Dread, turning to look back at the men and women frozen in stone, waiting on me, trusting in me.
There had barely been any cohesion at all. The disruption to magic was severe. I’d get a more accurate measurement tomorrow, but it definitely wasn’t happening this month.
P+2 months…
I lowered Dread again, sighing.
Based on all the times I’d seen it form, and comparing the required amount of cohesion, I wasn’t looking at a few months.
I was looking at years. Probably at least a decade, maybe two or more. I would need more datapoints.
The Portal leading to this time had been forty-six years in the future, and markedly faint. So I knew it wouldn’t take that long… but it could take almost that long.
I was going to be here for quite some time.
I reflected how elven brains dealt with the matter of time, and wasn’t worried, although my inherited human intensity was definitely going to run into a wall at some point.
But I had so many things to work out, I could pretty much expand them to fill any time whatsoever, and, well, I’d be getting older, which was exactly what I wanted to happen, regardless.
My eyes fell on the frozen figure and arched neck of the blue dragon Cirruluxul.
An evil, small e, dragon, but Neutral, and willing to submit to a stronger enemy… and I totally was that. Her very bloodline called her to a specific manner of behavior… but that did not mean that could not be overcome.
And time was what dragons needed to grow, too. I had a feeling that the dragon would see this as much of an opportunity as it was an interruption or imprisonment.
Well, there was no reason NOT to allow such a thing. The humans and hyn would be giving up precious years, and the elves would literally get bored to death, but a dragon?
Well, she would be keeping me company, I had a feeling.