I found myself hanging upside down over rapidly moving sewage by my ankles where Tizek and Void were holding me. I had removed my pink boots to allow the pair a better grip. The smell and strange warmth from the flow below gagged me as I looked out for the ring. I saw the polished mahogany ring inset with a square cut topaz just below. “Alright, lower me carefully.”

  “Are you sure this is the best way?” Void asked as she gripped one of my ankles.

  “I’d rather not climb down and get dirty if I can avoid it. The ring is right there on the ledge,” I called back up.

  “I thought these were supposed to be easy,” Void yelled back as she huffed.

  “They are. There’s a reason why no one found them already,” I called back up. Frankly, this one was easier than dealing with the angry magpie. The bird snatched up someone’s favorite leather gloves off a windowsill and used it to line a nest. The magpie was not happy when I climbed up the tree and called in his mate to harass me. I took a 10% hit to my health pool when I fell out of the tree, which was still missing. We had to duck into a café to get away from the angry birds.

  “I could have gone down, my lord,” Tizek said. The lizard-man was adamant he should take my place. He didn’t want me, his lord, getting covered in muck.

  “We went over this, buddy,” I called back. “I’ve done this enough times to be used to it.” That was a lie. It was always disgusting. If you see a sewage worker, give them thanks. Or at least an appreciative nod since that won’t disrupt the workflow.

  “A little more,” I called up. I could almost touch the ring with my fingertips on the little ledge just next to the ladder. The ring had rolled down a drain and, by some strange series of fortunate events, landed on the outcropping and not into the flowing sewage. Then I felt Void’s hand slipping from my ankle.

  This time, I had the wherewithal to plug my nose as well as close my eyes and my mouth. When Void lost her grip, my other leg wrenched away from Tizek. I banged my head against the ladder before plopping hard into the flowing river of filth.

  “Oh my! I’m sorry! Are you alright down there?” Void shouted down.

  “My lord! I will give myself lashings as punishment,” Tizek added. I could hear Lia laughing uncontrollably from above.

  I sat up out of the stink stream and looked at where the flow was going. A few unmentionables floated by toward the treatment facility where the solids would be skimmed and converted into fertilizers. After that, the water ended up in tanks where mages using a spell called Major Purification would clean the water before dumping it out into the ocean. Magic was surprisingly environmentally friendly and the people of Vialina cared about cleanliness. No dumping crap out on the streets.

  “I’m fine and Tizek? It was an accident, don’t hit yourself,” I called back up. The fall had shaved another 5% or so off my health bar. If I had to do too many of these, it would kill me. I hefted my stinking, soaked body out from the water and, after shaking my hands, I picked up the ring. I had just cleaned off at the arena and now I had to do it again.

  I climbed up out of the manhole and my faithful party scattered a few meters away while holding their noses. “What? No hug for the conquering hero?”

  “Not until you get a bath,” Void said with a nasally tone from plugging her snout with a pair of fingers.

  I grinned. “So that means I’ll get a hug.” Void rolled her eyes at the statement.

  As for me? This little event wouldn’t help my reputation. I was already a dud and seen as boring. Now there would be talk of me walking around town smelling like death warmed over. I couldn’t help it. The nearest baths weren’t discretely tucked away in an alley.

  One bath, with clothes laundering, a few meat skewers for lunch and a short wait at the Exterminator’s Guild office to turn in the quests later, we were standing out front of the Exterminator Guild’s library at around 2Af. The library was grown from a huge oak tree which took up most of the city block. With over a thousand years of records, scrolls and books, the Leoren Grand Exterminator’s Library rivaled institutions like Harvard and the New York Public Library back on Earth in sheer size.

  “Everyone, welcome to my home for the last few centuries,” I announced as I spread my arms out.

  “You spent how long in there?” Void asked as she looked at the building. Void’s parents frequently took her in there when she was a child to learn how to read. Lia and Tizek, meanwhile, were gawking at the size of the tree.

  “A couple hundred years,” I replied.

  “And you haven’t read it all yet?” Lia asked. She managed to close her mouth long enough to get the words out. Orphans from the slums never got to see trees like this, only the ratty, near dead ones dotting that part of town.

  I laughed. “Grand Creator save me, not even close. There are 26,418,942 documents in that building. Probably more since I doubt the record keeping in the basement stacks is all that great.”

  “You think there’s an answer somewhere in there?” Void asked as we proceeded up the wooden grand staircase to the main entrance. The entrance was wide and ornate. The library’s name was burned with detailed pyrography text on the entry portico and the top was a tangle of oak leaves. Ten sets of double doors allowed patrons to enter and exit from the street.

  “I hope so,” I said. “Otherwise, there is still the Mage’s Guild library, but I’d rather avoid that route if at all possible.” I shuddered at the thought. The only way I was able to gain access to the Mage’s Guild library was indirectly via Gully Jack’s organization. That was the most miserable three months of my time here and I only made that mistake once.

  Inside the library was just as impressive as outside. Beyond the ID checkpoint was a massive rotunda. Natural light streamed in from above which slightly flickered as it was filtered through the treetops. From the entry, we could see the tall stacks of books reaching up into the heavens. The building was eight floors tall.

  The central rotunda was dominated by comfortable reading chairs and university-style reading cubbies. Everything was designed for maximum comfort to allow for easy reading. Or, in the case of a few people I could see, sleeping. Taking a brief nap in a library was a time-honored tradition.

  After showing our ID cards, which included surprise we cleared our probation in such a short amount of time, we entered the rotunda area. Our feet passed through short, lush grass which smelled so good I wanted to remove my boots and run through it barefoot. I’ll save that for when we get into the breakout rooms.

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  “Where did you leave off?” Void asked as she peered around the room. Her eyes were drawn to a section of children’s literature on the ground floor where she spent much of her childhood.

  “I’m in the Maintenance section on the first floor,” I said. “I skipped over the romance novels and pulp periodical sections. I’m saving those for last since it’s unlikely they’ll have anything useful.”

  “Can we get one to read anyway?” Lia asked with a dreamy look in her eye.

  “Sorry, we’ll have to save that for some other time.” I really did want to read her a few of those books just to give her the experience. Problem is we never did find the time. All the more reason to find a solution now.

  When we arrived at one of the aisles in the library I hadn’t gone down yet, Void peered up at the stacks. “Are we looking for any books in particular?”

  I waved at the books on the end. “Let’s start right here and work our way down. I haven’t been through this one yet. I think we should pick up four or so each to get started,” I suggested. I then summoned a ladder, which came whizzing down from the other end of the aisle, and climbed up to the top to get the first four books from the top four shelves and handed them down.

  I found us a nice, quiet breakout room along the perimeter wall of the library and closed the door. That would give us more space to talk without disturbing the other visitors. You didn’t want to get the dreaded “shush” from one of the librarians. Here, they also came with a spell which forcibly silenced you for the remainder of your visit.

  We placed our books on the table and sat down. I suggested everyone remove their shoes and run their toes through the grass. It felt amazing and helped with what was about to come. I sat next to Lia while Void took the seat next to Tizek. Void and I were going to read our books out loud, at least the pertinent parts, to our illiterate party members so they could comment. This was going to get very boring, very fast.

  Two hours later, I closed a book on wooden armor cleaning and took a look at my stamina bar. In this world, mental effort would build up grey in the stamina bar the same as physical. I was already showing around 15% grey and was developing a mild buzz on my brain. Next to me, Lia had her head down on the table as she listened to me drone on about seed oil application.

  “How does your stamina bar look?” I asked.

  “I think I can fit about four of the grey sections in my bar before I’m full. My mana bar is also going grey,” Lia groaned. “This is boring. Can we take a break?”

  “After this next one,” I said. I pulled up the next book. It was a book titled Care and Feeding of your Pet Elementals. I glanced across the table at Void and Tizek. The lizard man was struggling to focus and his eyes were glancing out of the breakout room window, the slowly ticking clock on the wall, the ceiling, anything to keep his focus. Void was pinching her eyes where she obviously was developing mild strain while she read a book on remote viewscreen repair.

  I looked up at the clock and saw it was a little past 4Af. “Tell you what, let’s give this until 5Af and we’ll take a dinner break. After that, let’s give it two more hours. Any objections?”

  “Plenty,” Void groaned as she blinked and thumbed to the next page of her book. “But we need to power through this. I’d like to keep my memories three months from now.”

  Her comments hit me hard. I hadn’t thought about it from their perspective. I had a broad wealth of memories from different versions of Void, Lia and Tizek. Hundreds to thousands of them were, in many cases, their own individual people. All of those experiences were wiped out and reset every time the sky opened up and disgorged the green plume.

  To the three sitting here now, they were pondering their mortality. Erasing a memory was as no different than death. If we didn’t fix this now, they’d all be effectively reincarnated back to the day I arrived in this world, oblivious to everything they experienced after. Me, each other, rendered back to random strangers they wouldn’t even recognize passing in the street.

  No, stop it. Get that out of your head. I’m on a mission. I opened the book and skimmed past the introduction, foreword and annoying self-aggrandizing the book’s author engaged in before getting to the meat of the subject. The first section was on air elementals. I read aloud how keeping them in a cage and flying them into the upper atmosphere like a kite was the best way to feed them. Then I read aloud a section on how to use special dungeon crystals to repair damage.

  “Hold on,” Lia said, her eyes indicating she found something interesting. “Did that just say healing the air?”

  “That it is. Air Knitting crystals combined with a low-tier mana core will help stitch up an air elemental when it’s damaged,” I read from the text.

  “What if we use that to fix the hole in the sky? It’s in the air, right?” Lia asked, getting excited.

  I thought on it a moment. No, that probably wouldn’t work. “Let’s keep this in mind, but I don’t think it will work. The rip isn’t in the air,” I explained.

  “But it’s up in the air, right? Why not?” Lia asked as her enthusiasm began to drain.

  I didn’t know how to explain the concept of molecules to the people here. For as sophisticated they were with magic and even had luxuries that rivaled Earth, they were still behind on other concepts. “Wave your hand through the air. Feel that? Air is really a whole lot of tiny invisible objects. The portal is coming from the empty space between them.”

  Lia waved a clawed hand and watched her fur ruffle as it moved. Her face fell. “Oh, that was a stupid idea.”

  I shook my head. “There are no stupid ideas. I like the enthusiasm. Besides, we never know if this will help us. It’s good information to have if we want to try something. If nothing comes up, we can try launching a bunch of these crystals at the portal and see if it works.”

  Lia didn’t look particularly proud of her observation. It was a common face I recalled from long ago in my classrooms when a student made an observation that wasn’t quite correct. It was hard keeping the enthusiasm for learning going when making an embarrassing mistake.

  Then I caught something Void said as she was reading out loud. “Be sure to tune the border control rods or the connective portal will destabilize and collapse.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “What section is that?”

  Void yawned and looked at the page with bleary eyes. “It’s how to keep the remote image signal eye connected to the slate. If the control rods fail, the connection will fail.”

  “Can I see that book?” I said as I felt a wave of excitement washing over me. Void gladly handed the dull manual to me and I looked at the page.

  The page talked about how the visual slates worked. While generating a live image on a slate wasn’t unusual, they couldn’t produce broadcasts or form dynamic connections. Each slate had to be paired with a roving eye which had a limited range. Upwards of four eyes could be paired with a slate, which is how the arena split its image into four quadrants to show the aftermath of Aoto’s fight.

  The exception was text data, which could be two-way, though having a central server slab was ungodly expensive and needed replacement every three years since it was a difficult to obtain dungeon formed material. Our Guild IDs could communicate with the central server and accept quests, make dungeon reservations and even read dungeon guides. The data stream was small enough a slate could open up multiple connections without interfering with a neighbor.

  I read more technical details and discovered the eyes worked by opening a microportal between it and the slate. One of the things I ran into a dead end early was researching portals. Teleportation and portals in this world were impossible. If anything larger than a pin prick was opened, the portal destabilized and collapsed back into mana. Further, only information mana streams could be sent, nothing physical. That’s why I abandoned that avenue of study. Clearly, whatever was coming from the other side used a radically different method of creating portals this world had no information on.

  But my eyes landed on one of the necessary devices to keep the slate functional. It was a total miss on my part since I never randomly sat down with a technical document on how visual slates worked. Opening the data portal was a difficult process. The system used to open the portal was imprecise and created a rupture. This world didn’t understand the concept of space-time, but the description indicated it was cutting and folding it to form the connection.

  The key was the control rods. Six rods were arranged in a circle around the transmitter to repair the rip in space. The rods had to keep the portal contained or else the connection would be lost when the rip collapsed and closed up again.

  I felt the edges of my mouth twitch. There, on the following page, was a schematic. On it was a small red rod with a small coil attached to it. The coil was made of a magically conductive silk fiber. The other end of the fiber was connected to a mana storage crystal formed from a mana core. Grand Creator preserve, they had the rudimentary beginnings of a reflective emitter.

  My old optics memories started firing. If I could find these crystals, get enough silk, find a big enough power source and, maybe, find a reflective surface, I could craft a magical equivalent of a laser. Maybe, just maybe, if it was strong enough, this device could stitch together the rip in the sky and repel the invasion.

  I knew it was premature, but I just couldn’t help myself. Big breakthroughs like this were few and far between lately. I began bouncing in my seat before jumping up. “This could be it!” I shouted.

  My excitement spread to the other three who started to wake up from their stupor. I began yelling loudly and jumping up and down. I rushed around the table in my joy and planted a huge kiss on Void’s lips. Then I looked down, big smile on my face and saw hers looking at me with utter shock.

  I immediately backed off. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I forgot you just met me.”

  Void reached up slowly and touched her lips. She seemed to be trying to decide if she liked it or not. “That’s understandable. I’m sure we’ve done that before. Just give me more time to get to know you better before we try again.”

  “My lord?” Tizek spoke, oblivious to what just happened. “You found a solution?”

  “Maybe. I’ll need to check this book out and see how easy it is to get these materials. But I think we’re onto something,” I replied, still happy.

  A soft beep rang out in the room followed by a voice. “Please keep the noise down. This is your final warning.”

  I gave a meek wave up to the ceiling where the transmitter eye and speakers were. The library had set up two devices to communicate into the room, which was the only way to get a two-way system in place. I had to resist looking for the eye and ripping it apart to examine the control rod array.

  “Where can we find the materials?” Lia asked using her inside voice.

  I shrugged. “That’s the next part of our research.”

  Void raised her hand. “If I may? I don’t want to read anymore. I think we should just ask my parents. They know dungeons from when they were younger.”

  I looked over the faces of my companions. While I could see they were in good spirits after what I just said, they were clearly exhausted. Heading back to The Gnashing Teeth would do everyone some good. “Let me check this book out then and we’ll head back.”

  After I dropped off the books we no longer needed on a cart and checked out the repair manual, we left the library and fought through the growing rush hour pedestrian traffic back to the pub.