Whatever Ishani had been expecting to see when she stepped into the new universe, it wasn't this. Every other dungeon she'd been into had some kind of entry hall, or at least opened into a building on the two occasions when the dungeon proper was an open world kind.

This was most definitely not a room somewhere deep in a building, or under the ground. It wasn't even a building in an open world. There had been talk, she remembered, of this dungeon being a desert world. That was also not the case.

The Gate stood free among the rocks on the banks of a crystal clear lake surrounded by mountains on three sides, to the right of the Gate, the land fell away to a valley sloping down into what looked like a primordial forest. It felt hot, the local star beating down on them with unrelenting fury. This was unlike anything she'd seen before, on either side of the bridge. The heat was dry instead of the humid air she was used to from living in New Delhi, and the breeze that came off the snow capped peaks around them was brisk enough to be chilly. The ground underfoot was pebbly soil with scrub grass and gorse bushes there were occasional boulders of a different colour to the smaller stones. The snow line was higher up the mountains around them and there was clearly a glacier retreating up between two of the closer mountains, a rivulet of meltwater running from its base. These details were catalogued by her sub-conscious as her conscious mind did a threat assessment, which was surprisingly easy. There was very little cover, the only place large enough to hide any significant force in the immediate vicinity would be under the water.

A cry of a bird sounded and her head turned to track it, her staff coming out to cover the potential threat instinctively. A spot on the near side of one of the mountains resolved in her vision to what appeared to be a bird, not unlike the brahminy kites that were living in the cities around the Indian sub-continent these days, only much larger.

"Clear!" she reported, the cry being echoed from all around as each team member finished their own assessment.

"I think we're in luck here! Look at this place, water, the only approach is uphill, there's enough rock to make a solid foundation, if we gather enough of them together." cried Wolfgang, clearly pleased to have found such a tactically sound place to set their forward camp. "We can build the forward camp right here around the Gate. I bet we can even run a cable through and get solid comms. This is perfect."

"It does look good. I'll start the analysis kits for water and soil. Air showed no issues when it was sampled." Lin made as good as her word, un-clipping some over-sized test tubes and beginning to shovel some soil into one.

Adili looked pensive, "I'll do the time check, these rocks, it looks like an erosion pattern that happened, not like the created patterns we normally see. I worry that the time differential is much higher than it appeared, which is going to affect our mission parameters. I allowed for up to a twenty to one differential, but this... this is different to what was seen three days ago. This place was dark all the time then. I think it was a cave. It should only have been a month inside. But..." With that he turned around and stepped back through the Gate.

Watching someone cease to exist in your universe was a strange sight, Adili's hand touched the boundary of the Gate and the rest of his arm and body sort of flowed through it. The interface engulfed you completely before disgorging you on the other side. This prevented the time differential from creating tidal forces which ripped your body apart as one side of your body was suddenly subjected to 12 or 30 gravities while the other side was at good old Earth standard one gee. The Gates also shielded both sides from the gravitational interference that these tidal stresses would cause.

Throughout all of this, Chris had been stood quite still looking pensive.

"What's up, big man?" asked Adili. Ishani would have asked the same thing, but in more polite terms, though she still hardly knew any of them.

"There's something familiar about this place. You see that?" Chris pointed out towards the valley below them, at the rather picturesque mountain on the far side of the valley as it curved away. It was perfectly framed between the large mountains at the end of the lake from where they were stood. "I've seen that before, but it was older. The peak was broken and round, this whole place is making me remember the flavour of fish and chips and I don't know why."

Trying to help, Ishani asked "What's fish and chips? Like potato wafers you get a packet, but with fish in? Sounds tasty to be honest, I've never seen them though. Maybe you ate it when you saw something like this?"

Chris frowned. "It might not have occurred to you, but I'm not Indian. Wasn't born there, moved there for a job after university. It was a long time ago, but I was born and raised in a place that's not a country any longer. I was born in the, and I'm not making it up, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, what a mouthful. No one called it that though, it was just the UK or if you were feeling incorrect, Britain. The national dish, so it was said, was fish and chips. Which was a white sea fish, traditionally cod, which was battered, deep-fried and served with big thick cut potato fries, which we called chips. Language has drifted a bit since then." He paused here to stare back at the mountain in the distance. "I personally didn't really like it, I was more a fan of the spicier curries that we were famous for, despite being fifty North. Lot of history between India and the UK."

"There were very few times I actually remember eating fish and chips, and they were largely when I was on a scouting trip."

"You were a scout? Wasn't this before dungeons? What were you scouting for? Were you at war?" Ishani interjected, a confused look on her face.

"Hah! Yes we were at war, but it wasn't happening in our country, it was far away, closer to India than the UK. But that wasn't important to me at the time. Scouting was sort of a youth camping club, we learnt some simple survival skills, went camping under the stars. It was a good time, I spent it with friends. Let's get the camp set up while we wait for Adili. It shouldn't take him more than a day to get back I hope."

With that they started to put together the perimeter alarm kit they'd brought with them. THe heavy fortifications, the actual building they'd be living in and the long term supplies would follow when Adili got back. After the stakes had been planted around their proposed campsite, Chris took his small shovel, almost a trowel, and carefully began scraping a circle between them. He cleared it of all plants,small rocks and large stones, leaving a smooth and clear line between each stake. The six stakes were at about sixty degrees from each other, with the Gate at the centre. After he'd finished this, he touched the nearest stake and closed his eyes. The circle lit up, revealing it was actually a very lumpy shape that just looked circular if you were looking at each section alone. Then the stakes began to glow with blue light as the runes carved all through them activated. There began a slow movement of the lines to describe a nearly perfect circle around the Gate, broken only by the stakes which were still out of place. Then as the line grew brighter, there was a feeling of tension in the air which built and built until suddenly the stakes dragged themselves through the ground as though on elastic stretched to its limit. They came to rest on the circumference of the perfect circle. The furrows left behind by the stakes began to vibrate. Then the rest of the inside of the circle began to vibrate.

A sudden blast of air came down from above the Gate, scouring the land around it, but apparently not touching the party or anything they had brought with them. All the rocks, stones, plants and apparently a lot of small life forms that had been quietly living in this valley were blown out of the circle. After the waves of magic had finished, the area inside the circle was flat, level and clear of all obstructions.

"He likes to show off for new people", Lin commented.

After that, the work of setting up tents, digging latrines and the other basics of camping life were attended to. It didn't take them more than a few hours, but the sun was touching the horizon by the time they had a fire lit and some food cooked.

The four of them sat around the merrily burning fire, Chris having crossed the barrier created by the circle in a way none of them seemed to be able to, and wandered down the valley to the trees to gather wood soon after the work of making camp started. No one could say he wasn't putting effort in a few hours later when he had returned, dragging what seemed to be an entire tree with him.

Now that tree had been chopped, stacked and part of it was in the fire-pit while they ate. Ishani wasn't exactly sure what it was that they were eating, the MREs you got in a dungeon were made of ingredients, you didn't ask what ingredients. Still they didn't taste bad, they didn't taste much of anything, and they were filling. Nutritionally complete, the wrappers said. Lin had her own rations, which appeared to be slabs of rock and grave which she was happily pushing into her mouth and crunching loudly. When she noticed Ishani staring she turned to her and said "I'm made of rock, what else would I eat? It's actually pretty good, for rocks. There's only one real issue, there's no silicate version of chillies. Nothing that has that same fire. When we get ouf of here, I'm eating the spiciest thing I can find. And in Malaysia, that's going to be spicy."

"Why don't you have a circle to change back in, like you did in the pocket dungeon?"

"Readiness" Wolfgang replied. "If we're attacked, and it could happen, do you think they'll wait for our primary defender to change form and reorient herself in her body? That's why I'm a dwarf, he's a lion and Lin's making the word statuesque work for its money."

Lin's rock form needed very little sleep, so she volunteered to take that night's watch. There probably wasn't going to be anything happening the next day, and she could sleep in the sun for the couple of hours she needed.

Ishani walked to her tent, noticing how much the temperature had dropped while she was sat around the fire. Thankfully her sleeping bag was made of the most insulating material she'd ever seen, and once in she was nicely warm. The combination of a warm body and cold air after a day of emotional and physical work combined to send her to sleep rapidly. Her last conscious thought before sleep was that tomorrow Adili would probably be back, and they'd have the joy of building their forward camp before they actually got to explore.