Bob wound his way through the crowd of excited, and in many cases, drunken Australians. He found Dave, Amanda, and Jessica sitting in folding chairs beside the Dungeon entrance. Bumping up against Dave's leg, he was looking the man in the eye when suddenly Jessica pulled him into her lap. "God, he's so cute!" She exclaimed as Bob struggled.

Bob dropped a portal underneath all three of them, falling into his inventory, and as they said yes, the others fell through it as well. Jessica was the last to do so, clearly have been taken by surprise. Thankfully, all parties involved had traveled via his portals before, and they knew what to expect, and while Bob also had to deal with falling off Jessica's lap, he landed on his feet.

He glared up at them for a moment, then he released the persistent effect, and he flowed back into his human form.

"You make such an adorable kitty!" Jessica grinned before looking around, "Also, where are we?"

"My inventory," Bob replied, straightening his shirt.

"Your inventory looks like a lot like a bleedin' apartment, mate," Jessica replied as she pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

"Can we go back to the bit where you have a secret Maine-coon form?" Amanda asked.

"Not really a secret," Bob shrugged, "it's one of the spells from the Divine School of Animal. Monroe loves it when I play with him as a kitty. Does make it handy for getting around without getting lynched."

"Lynched?" Dave asked, clearly confused before understanding dawned across his face. "Bob, they were cheering for you, not yelling at you."

"Hard to tell the difference from my perspective," Bob grumbled before turning to the fridge to hide a blush. He'd been working awfully damn hard on his ability to read people or the lack thereof, but there were times when it just didn't click.

"Anyone want a beer?" Bob asked as he opened the stasis box, pulling out a bottle of water for himself.

A chorus of agreement sounded behind him, so he pulled out a trio of bottles and walked back over to the table, placing them in front of his guests before pulling out his chair and sitting down.

"When did you start drinking beer?" Amanda asked as she popped the top off hers.

"I don't," Bob admitted, "but I've brought a few people here, and it made sense to keep a few drinks for guests."

"So we aren't the first to be admitted to Bob's secret hide-away," Jessica purred, "I'd be disappointed, but I prefer men with a few levels under their belt."

Dave rapped Jessica on the nose with a finger. "Bad Jessi, no playing with Bob," he grinned.

"It's ok," Bob sighed, "I'm trying to get more comfortable with that kind of thing, it's ridiculous that I let it throw me."

"Oh, does that mean there is someone you're interested in?" Amanda smiled broadly. "Maybe someone we know?"

"No, I'm just trying to work on my near-crippling social anxiety, I don't really see people like that," Bob explained, fighting his discomfort.

"One step at a time," Dave nodded encouragingly, "you've already come a long way from the man we knew back in freshmen year at UCLA."

"Well, I hate to be the one who tells you, but after the show you put on with that ritual, there quite a few Australian lasses harboring a crush on you," Jessica smiled.

"What show?" Bob asked, confused. He'd dropped a five-fold ritual, sure, but unless someone had Mana Sight up, it probably would have been a bit boring watching him sit there.

'You've not only reached the tier six cap but so have your Divine Elemental schools,' Trebor informed him. 'At this point, the power you exert when casting a true ritual is visible to the naked eye. I can explain how to hide your workings if you'd like.'

"Dude, we could see the magic," Dave gushed, "it was like complicated fractals overlaying and interleaving with each other, each one a different set of shades."

"It was fucking awesome," Jessica agreed, "and there you were, sitting in the center of it, orchestrating these gorgeous flows of colour."

"Then everything flares, and we can see the mana all around us before it rushes into the pattern and slams down around you, lighting you up," Amanda explained gleefully. "It. Was. Amazing!"

"Oh," Bob replied. He shook his head. "I think I must have reached some sort of threshold as far as spellcasting power goes," he shrugged, "just goes to show I don't know everything, right?"

Mike looked across the table at Eric. "You're sure?"

Eric nodded, "Absolutely."

Mike had to admit that he'd lost sight of the goal. It was too easy to get caught up in the insane bureaucracy.

"I'm in," he said with a sigh. "Amanda's parents could handle the administration of the Dungeon easily enough," he admitted. They were a formidable pair, and it was easy to see how they'd run a small empire of successful businesses.

"We need Bob," Eric said.

"Either Bob or a lot more men capable of casting the regeneration ritual," Mike agreed. He was not unaware of the fact that Bob had cast regenerate for eighteen hours straight, while the engineers building out the Dungeons had complained that if they didn't take a three or four-minute break between rituals, within an hour, they started to become fatigued and make mistakes, at which point things started to go wrong.

"What's our time frame?" Mike asked.

"Well, we need a place to store everyone, ideally a place with a Dungeon, even if it's just a single floor," Eric said. "We found a plateau about fifty miles to the south, it's about seven miles in diameter, so plenty of room for us. There's about a quarter of a mile between the plateau and the mountains surrounding the valley it's in, which makes for a very defensible position."

"So we need Bob to get a Dungeon started there," Mike mused. "We'll also need a few greenhouses and people willing to take the Druid paths to grow food. Luckily it's well into spring, so we can live out of tents for a while without it becoming an issue."

"I've got someone lined up with a couple of trailers filled with tents, cots, and MRE's," Eric replied. "He's army, but good people."

"I take it you've continued selling copper?" Mike asked.

"And aluminum," Eric agreed, "turns out that a solid block of aluminum is worth a pretty penny as well, and it helps to keep us from depressing the price of copper."

"Well, at least we're flush with cash," Mike shook his head. "Are we planning to build towers for housing?"

"Sort of," Eric hedged, "we're only going to have one Dungeon, but we're going to drive it deep. We figure we'll build a bunch of huge warehouses, set up like a self-storage place, except with each unit spatially expanded. We aren't looking to build skyscrapers, and we aren't going to be cramming nearly as many people into the space, plus they're going to be active, not in stasis."

"I can see that," Mike replied.

"So the big question is, how soon can we get Bob involved?" Eric asked.

"We usually have breakfast together a couple of times a week," Mike scratched his chin thoughtfully. "I haven't seen him for a day or two, so I expect I'll see him either tomorrow morning or the day after."

"He'll get on board, right?" Eric asked anxiously.

"Saving people, killing monsters?" Mike chuckled. "That's kind of Bob's thing."

"We've scouted all the proposed sites, and we're ready to start building as soon as we can start building Dungeons," Wayna smiled at Eddi and cuddled in closer to his side.

"That's fantastic," Eddi squeezed her tightly. "We're blazing through the levels. Bob's idea to use the Animal affinity crystals to enhance our summons was brilliant; even if we don't have the swarm, our single summons are just as strong, so we aren't having a problem killing monsters. We should be able to start work on the Dungeons next week."

"Seventy-three Dungeons will take a while," Wayna sighed, "which means I'll see even less of you."

"We should be done before the next wave," Eddi clambered around the couch and positioned himself behind her, where he started to rub her shoulders.

"That feels nice," Wayna mumbled, leaning her head forward to give him better access. "You think they'll be done in six months?"

"I do," Eddi confirmed. "we've got a lot of crystals coming in, and as we build out each Dungeon, that number will only increase."

"I guess I should ask the big question," Wayna murmured quietly. "How high are you planning to go?"

Eddi paused for a moment before continuing to work at the knot he'd found. "Tier seven," he said quietly. "At tier seven, with an Affinity Crystal, I can cap my Summon Mana-Infused skill at level one hundred and twenty-four. It will take forever to get it to that point, but once I have it capped, it'll ensure we're protected from wave and tide. And," he was barely audible now, "tier seven is the last chance to really have kids."

He knew the rules as well as anyone did. Having kids at tier five was fairly easy. Well, at least conceiving them was. Tier six took a bit longer, but it was rare for a couple not to succeed given enough time. At tier seven, the changes to your body were more pronounced, and the strength of your matrix made it harder to have children. Much harder. Some couples took decades to conceive a child.

Tier eight was regarded as the tier where children were a miracle. The energy that suffused your body at that point had supplanted most biological functions.

He and Wayna had both agreed that they wanted children.

"Tier seven it is then," she agreed after a few long moments of silence, "but no higher," she said firmly. "I'm not rushing to have children, as much fun as practicing is," she giggled, "but I do want them."

"No higher," Eddi agreed, pausing his massage to lean down and kiss Wayna's neck.

Jack couldn't keep the grin off his face as he watched Raul and his crew at work.

Magic was fucking awesome.

Raul had gotten two dozen men from his work crews to come over, and once they'd realized what was being offered to them, they'd returned to LA and brought back the rest of the crew over, along with their families.

He'd scouted out this place a few weeks ago. Two rivers came together as they flowed down from the mountains and out across the plains. The whole area reminded him of Montana, or maybe North Dakota. Big Sky country.

He'd brought one of his old classmates, Elisha, in on the project, as she'd become an urban planner. She'd been ecstatic once she realized what was possible with magic.

The city walls would be laid out as an octagon, just over two miles across. The rivers would be sacrosanct, with a hundred yards from each bank reserved as parkland and only a single bridge crossing each one. The triangle of land between the two rivers before they merged would be the home of the city's commercial district and also where the Dungeon would be located.

The construction crews were camped out on the plains outside of the city as they worked to raise the walls. They had already built a patchwork of gardens, as dozens of people had been enthralled with the idea of growing their own food so quickly and easily.

The decision to go all out had been made early on, and if it required cooperative casting to produce marble blocks, what did it matter? Mana Crystals were an infinitely renewable resource, and it was a lot easier to do it right the first time.

This would be a city like no other and would serve as the flagship that would bring people in droves.

Raul had questioned the need for hundred-foot walls that were seventy feet thick, right up to the moment when he'd seen the monster wave from the walls of Holmstead. The upper reaches of the wall would have a latticework of passages and rooms that, once spatially expanded, would serve as housing as well as a reinforced redoubt for the population during a wave or tide.

Jack estimated that it would take another month to complete the walls. He'd taken a page out of Bob's book and purchased a job lot of small hydroelectric generators. It turned out that it was a lot easier to set up a loop to constantly move water through one of those, and it also saved the materials and effort of setting up a complete grid. Handing off the responsibility of feeding Mana Crystals to the generator over to the residents was one less thing to worry about.

By the time the walls were complete, the Dungeon would be established, if not fully built, and he'd split the builders' focus between building out the commercial district and erecting a series of skyscrapers along the walls.

Elisha had designed the city to have a skyscraper at each point of the octagon. Each structure would be able to house tens of thousands of people, allowing people who didn't want the hassle of maintaining lawns and gardens to have a place. The rest of the space was a marvel of interlocking plots of land, with a public garden or park surrounded by between six and a dozen homes.

It was going to be breathtaking and gloriously green. The pinnacle of the design were the interlocking rituals that would keep the city comfortably within a climate between late spring and early summer. He would be able to schedule the rain to fall only at night. It would be ruinously expensive, with the most recent estimate stating that it would require ten thousand mana crystals a day to maintain, with an addendum stating that due to lack of data on this sort of project, that number could easily be off by a factor of ten.

The dome was a long-term plan and one that likely wouldn't come to fruition until the Dungeon was fully built and staffed at full occupancy.

He shook his head. He'd learned a few hard truths from his time in Holmstead. It wasn't that the people of Thayland were lazy, it was that the deeper you had to delve for crystals, the less frequently they coalesced, and when combined with the ever-increasing volume of them required to advance, a lot of people found a level where they were comfortable, and settled into a steady routine.

It wasn't uncommon for people to stall out at the tier cap because it took so many crystals to push past it, and Mana Crystals didn't last forever. They'd need to dedicate themselves to delving every day, for months, in order to breakthrough, and for a lot of them, it just wasn't worth it. They had children to raise, businesses to run, and at level twenty-five, and they had time.

The problem was that Tides killed those people.

The solution was the Affinity Crystals and their attendant paths.

Jack estimated that he might be able to push into tier seven before the System integrated Earth, but there were a lot of factors that might make that impossible. He was certain he'd be able to reach tier six, reincarnate, and be well past the tier five level cap before then, but beyond that...

Eighty to ninety-hour weeks weren't anything new, and he wasn't the sort to give up just because it was hard.