There was a chill in the air that morning, the train was an electric conversion, and the ancient wooden walls weren't designed for these temperatures. Chris tucked his head against the icy wind coming in through one of the many gaps where the corpse of an old commuter train had been stuck to the drive train.

"Everything's been half broken since the North fell," a grey haired man sat opposite Chris, "but you're not helping yourself with that get up." He gestured at Chris' loose elasticated tee-shirt and shorts. "Of course you're too young to remember the days when Delhi was always too hot."

Coughing slightly as he held back a laugh, Chris just shrugged. This happened to him every time he took a train to work, but no one ever seemed to think that he might have a reason for it. Nor that he remembered very well the days when New Delhi, as it was then, was hotter than hell and a startling mix of ancient customs and modern metropolis. He was almost certainly older than the grey haired and frail looking man opposite him, despite his youthful looks.

Through the window opposite him The Dome, capital letters definitely required, appeared. It stood over the point Chris used to work at in the University of Delhi. Literally above that point, because his office was next to the lab around which this nexus was formed. It was all about the inverse square law, the further you were from the nexus, the less it affected house prices. For the two hundred metres around the nexus though, this prime nexus, real estate was so valuable that they'd built up, down and around. The Dome was correctly a sphere, but above ground it just looked like a dome. Chris' office was right in the centre. It was barely larger than a cubicle, having been sub-divided from a much larger room back in the past, but it was probably worth several times his decadal salary. Still it wasn't like anyone could evict him from it, he had religious tenure.

The ambient field strength out here was just starting to creep past his threshold and Chris knew that within a few seconds he'd start to feel the effects. Around him, pretty much everyone else was already well underway with their own changes. The old man had already completely changed. He was a little taller, a little thinner, and a lot more elven. His ears now came to a sweeping point, several centimetres behind his head. "Ah, you're all human eh?" he said to Chris.

At that moment, Chris felt the change come upon him. The loose, elasticated clothing that had first prompted the man's comment rapidly stretched to the limits of what it could bear. The chill wind against Chris' skin faded as thick and soft fur burst through his skin. His face took on a leonine cast and his short trimmed black hair grew out into a thick, luxuriant mane. The worst part of the change was the vertigo he got from having his eyesight suddenly corrected and his height jump by seventy centimetres from his normal hundred and sixty-five to a towering two metres and change. Then his hips and knees reversed and the crunching pop as the joints reseated reminded him that maybe being a little dizzy wasn't the worst part of the experience.

The old elf on the other side of the train leant back as he was suddenly crowded by the feline behemoth opposite him. "Oh, you're a high magic one then. Guess it's not all magic swords and adventure."

Ten minutes later they pulled into the Dome's westernmost train station. Nodding to the old elf, Chris stood up and assumed the crouch that was third nature by now, so he wouldn't bump his head on the low ceiling. Then he hunched nearly double to get out of the door. As he stepped into the brisk morning air, the breeze ruffled his mane and a sound from the entrance to the station made him wince.

"Avatar, welcome!"

"My lord, praise be!"

"Font of power, hear my plea!"

Chris tried to make himself as small as a giant lion man with literal golden fur could as he rushed to the exit from the station. He quickly flicked on as he walked, noting the classes, names and guilds of those who pursued him. Clerics of the God of Magic, a paladin of the god of Magitech and oh by the sainted tentacles of the deep ones, Morag. Morag wasn't a priest, mendicant or other hanger on. She did not want him to perform a miracle, she wasn't impressed by his many God bestowed gifts. She was more tenacious and fierce than any monster he'd faced in a dungeon and frankly he was quite intimidated by her. Morag was this generation's HR manager for his division and she was clearly chasing him to pressure him into another task that would benefit her, the company, both worlds and indeed everyone but himself. With a thought and a twinge of guilt, he reached out to the magic that now permeated the world around him and with a deft tug made the next gust of wind a little stronger and a little sooner. The wall of air pushed people back from the tracks and into Morag's path, giving Chris the time he needed to make good his escape at a nearby teleport pad. Technically the pads were only for use by station staff, but seeing as he was the local embodiment of magic, they obeyed him as if he was their god.

Stepping off the teleport pad just down the hall from his office, Chris winced again, this wasn't his day. There in the middle of the rather bland and institutionalised corridor stood a man. There was little to mark this man out from any other in the city, which after three hundred years of enforced multiculturalism and racial mixing meant that he was a gentle golden hue of skin, about a hundred and eighty centimetres tall and dark of hair and eye. It was Arun, his direct manager.

"Oh, morning Chris! I was hoping to see you today. Did Morag find you?"

"Er, I think I might've seen her at the station, but it was very busy. What's up? Is there something other than a dangerously powerful dungeon manifesting outside Kuala Lumpur?" Chris tried to lade his words with sarcasm. There was very little that could be more important than his team's work when there was a high level dungeon appearing near a major metropolitan area. There wasn't enough of humanity left that they could be blasé about the possibility of losing a city. Chris strode forward, finally having the momentum today he felt. Nothing could trump his work today, and by extension, his pilgrimage to the shrine in his office.

"Actually yes! We need to talk about Ishani." Arun said around a seemingly genuine smile.

Chris actually stumbled at this news. The idea that a random person was important enough that they'd unleashed both hounds on him when he was about to get to business was shocking.

"You've surely heard of her by now. Star of the academy, level twenty five before she turned twenty. Top grades in swordwork, magework and," here Arun's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, "It's said that Xijon itself favours ]# her."

Ah, that explains it. If there's a chance the god of luck is on her side, they're hoping to cultivate another avatar thought Chris to himself. Out loud he replied "No, sorry. Not been paying attention to this decade's crop. My team's got years left in them, at least another two decades."

"Oh." Arun sounded disappointed, his emotive brown eyes echoed the tone of his voice and made Chris feel like he'd just told a puppy off for wagging its tail at him. "Well, the thing is that the council has decided she needs to get some boosting. It's only a category four over at KL, I'm sure you can handle it and help bring the next generation up."

Chris sighed and looked his manager in the eye. There were reasons, damn good reasons, why he rarely added anyone new to his team and Arun knew it. More to the point, the council knew it as well if not better. Most of them had been on his team in their younger days,

"Arun, you know I can't just add people to my team. You know what it does to me. I can't protect someone and do a cat four in one day. It'd be the death of me and everyone I'm with."

"Yes, we know. You're not going to protect her in your way, just the ordinary way. We think that if you extend your protection it might jeopardi..." Arun stopped as his ears caught up with what his mouth was saying.

"You think it might stop her becoming the avatar of the god of chance if she's tainted by the protection of the avatar of the god of Magic, right?"

"Luck, not change, and fine! Yes! We want Earth, humanity, to have more than one representative of the Gods here. Is that so bad?"

Behind Arun, what appeared to be a walking wall stepped out of Chris' office. Lin was their front line fighter and defence specialist. Right now she was Chris' best defence against office politics. "Lin" he shouted. "Lin, can you tell Arun that we can't take a low levelled recruit into a category four, no matter how much Xijon wants to get into her pants."

Lin was in conversation with someone else when Chris shouted, then from behind the craggy rockface that was Lin's magically enhanced form, a young elf woman Chris didn't recognise stepped out. Her pale skin was flushed red as her mind processed what Chris had been saying. Above her head, visible only to those with the skill floated the name Ishani.

Chris paused, realising that his tirade had effectively called the young woman nothing more than a god's plaything.

"Arun, I think Ishani here will be a fine diver in a few levels." Lin said, throwing pointed glares at Chris. "Don't you agree Chris?"

"Uh, yes? Sure. In a few levels. But not today. Not with us. It's too dangerous."

"No Chris, Wolfgang and Adili agree. Laura's not met her yet, but I'm sure she will too. Ishani can come today. We'll make sure she's fine. Won't we."

"Fine. But if anything happens, this isn't my fault. I can't protect her properly. You know what it does to me." Chris' complaints sounded weak to his ears, but he couldn't let it go without a fight.

At this Lin softened as much as a walking rock could. "I know. I know. And I wouldn't bring her along if we couldn't do this. She has a Talent, and it's one that'll serve her well on a dive. It's a protection Talent, not like mine, but good enough. And she's skilled enough to actually help."

"Fine," the hot rush of blood to his ears made Chris feel glad of his fur covering his blushes. "What's her position?"

Arun leapt forward with a folder full of parchment and vellum with apparently everything Ishani had done since birth written on it. Paper didn't take well to a high magic environment, the dead fibres tried to absorb the mana and ignited shortly afterwards. A good thick vellum would work for centuries though.

Sighing again, Chris took the folder and headed into his office, brushing past the still silent Ishani. "Come on in you two", he said as he entered the room, "I'll put the kettle on and you can tell me how you can help us newbie."