The next morning dawned bright and cold, temperatures overnight seemed to plummet and stay low, it was of some concern to Ishani that Adili hadn't returned yet, at a twelve to one ratio, he should have been able to spend an hour outside directing the homunculi to start passing everything they'd unpacked from the pocket dungeon through.

She couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong about this dungeon, it was far too peaceful. According to Lin's bleary-eyed conversation over breakfast, the only thing that had disturbed the night was a flyover by what appeared to be an owl. The field sample kits had worked their magic, literally, and Lin had prepared a quick report overnight about the composition of the water and soil and their contaminants. Everything looked suspiciously normal. It was common for a dungeon to pull bits of the outside world into itself and copy it, but that was normally leavened by mythological magical creatures. Here the magic levels were high, but the lifeforms were still relatively normal, with very little in the way of magical usage. They had human/human derived sentient compatible proteins though, so they were edible. The rocks were also a good match for Lin in her silicate form.

The day was lazier than Ishani expected. Chris was the only one who could leave the camp site, so he did a little scouting and brought more samples back for analysis. The field sample kits in their packs were nearly exhausted by the evening, which had still brought no sign of Adili. Days here were just a tad shy of twenty-four hours long, judging from noon to noon. The evening meal was subdued. Wolfgang had spent the afternoon napping in preparation of taking that night's watch. Over the campfire, Chris made an announcement, that they'd be exiting the dungeon tomorrow if Adili had not returned. He was going to use a ritual no one else had ever heard of which would, apparently synchronize the circle with the outside world, creating a new boundary at the circle's edge. There were two reasons that Adili was late returning, neither of which boded well for the dive. Firstly there was a problem outside which was preventing him from returning, which meant that they were trapped in here with few supplies, or they would face issues outside when they left. Secondly and potentially much more worrying was that the time dilation was much higher than previously measured.

"Why would the time dilation be going up be bad? Doesn't that mean the dungeon is shrinking?" Ishani asked, as she chewed on the last of her evening meal.

"It's not as simple as that. We've detected no variation in magical flux since we arrived" Lin replied, "That means the dungeon is stable, at least on the gross level. So an increase in time dilation means... well I don't know what it means to be honest. It's normally a sign that the dungeon is shrinking. Smaller dungeons have less magic and draw less in. they have weaker monsters and they run fast. It's like they've only got so much time to go around and as they grow, they start to spread it out. I guess the only way this can happen is if this dungeon is pulling time in from outside? I don't even know how we'd measure that. I guess we'd have to look at the sky and see if the distant stars are moving differently to how we expect. If it's a multiple Gate dungeon, then there's a fair chance that it's draining some poor universe dry. We might be able to detect it if we get to the other gate."

The rest of the evening was spent in quiet contemplation as the party contemplated the varying possibilities and their consequences for them.

The night was still strong when the sound of Wolfgang shouting came to them all. "We've got mail!" he shouted. "Looks like my boy got through safely!"

Lin shouted "Could this have not waited until morning?" Though she was awake already, she was surprisingly solicitous of Ishani's sleep. She seemed to want to present the party as being better than ones she'd been in before, almost like she was selling it to her.

"No, because you need to hear what the letter says. He's been outside for all of a minute, we left about fifteen seconds before he came out. That means we're looking at a dilation of one and a half days to one minute now. That's insane. There's, err thirty-six times sixty, hundred and eighty, one thousand eight hundred, add three sixty, two thousand one hundred and sixty to one. We need to get out of here."

"No, I don't think we should. If we sent a nuke in here, we've no clue where it's supposed to go, we can't say what it would do. We nuke to kill the core, if we can't kill the core, I don't know if we could destroy the Gate. I didn't design it so that would work. It's the core or nothing." Chris interjected from his tent.

Ishani was still quite groggy from sleeping but she realised that she'd heard something very strange. "What do you mean you didn't design it like that? You're not a core are you?"

"No. No, I'm not a core. But I did design the dungeons, or rather the rules of the dungeons, and the magic and the bridge and that's why I can't go across the bridge." The sound of hasty dressing came from Chris' tent and Ishani followed suit, eager to hear what Chris had to say. A few minutes later they were sat under the stars, eating a very early breakfast while Chris heated water for his morning espresso.

"Right, where do I begin but at the beginning. Three hundred and change years ago, I was born in the UK, you know that much already. I did the school thing, I got a degree in physics, I learnt to play Dungeons and Dragons. This is important, and you'll see why soon. I got a job as a data scientist at a start up, that was a small company, normally in tech with vast amounts of money from investors and generally only the germ of an idea but some shiny buzzwords. They gave me a little money and a lot of equity and I was happy. Right up to the point when we didn't have any money left and we didn't have a product or customers. Redundancy. So I took a chance, moved abroad and took a job working in the Physics department of the University of Delhi. You've been in my office. It was great to be honest. I worked in a team from all over the world. Robert was my teammate and we worked together on a new project. Time travel.

"Don't laugh, that was the aim of the bridge originally. There was an idea that if you slowed light down enough in a toroidal crystal, then it would warp the dimensions within it. Length would become height, height would become width, width would become time and time would become length. You could theoretically send a signal from your end of the tunnel to the other end, when it was opened. The idea was you could iterate a calculation and just send it back in time over and over again until you solved it. Basically instantaneous calculation for anything at zero energy cost. It was set to revolutionise AI, predictive software, everything.

"But of course, that never happened. The first time we opened one, we ended up twisting the fourth spatial dimension. Which wouldn't have been much of an issue, but apparently that particular dimension ties together the various 'planes', it's the connective tissue between realities. We opened a hole into another universe."

He stopped here and sipped his coffee. "I was brought in just after this, the scientific press was going wild and the next stage was to make bigger tori, that first one was big enough to let a laser through and not much else. The leakage of different physical laws made it dangerous, but that first excursion showed us how that worked, and it was very localised.

"The big one was about five years in the making, I was there from shortly after the first one. We crunched the numbers on every universe we contacted. We had a lot of data, and we had a lot of people. I rose to becoming a senior data scientist, mainly due to having been there for longer, not because I was especially good. The big one turned on and it connected to a universe which was pretty much like the ones we'd connected to before. Fifteen seconds later we disconnected, allowed the laser to cool and crunched the data. We repeated this for a few months, we tuned the bridge by varying the group phase velocity by heating and cooling the torus. Then one day we opened a bridge to another world. Not just space like before, but an actual world. and some rocks came through. This was amazing. This was a nobel prize for everyone and a book deal on the side.

"So we did it again, and again. Getting a lot more data and quite a bit more matter. A couple of months after our first trans-reality rock, we were about to present our finding. Robert and I needed to kick off a series of an analyses over a weekend, and frankly neither of us wanted to be there. We would have automated it, but I'm going to say that our sys-admin was evil and leave it at that. Enforced logout regardless of activity after eight hours, you need a hardware key to log in. Honestly who designs that? Someone who hates users, that's who. But they died two hundred and seventy years ago, so I win. So, back to the story. Neither of us wanted to be there, it was hot, it was summer, I had an actual girlfriend who I wanted to spend time with, she even loved dungeons and dragons like me. Robert had his own stuff going on too, but one of us had to be there. So we did what all rational adults would do, we did paper-scissors-stone for it. I lost.

"So I was there that weekend, and since I basically had to sit there for five hours while a job ran and internet was verboten in the lab, I set the PC to beep when it was done and did my favourite thing. I meditated. I love meditating even now. I started when I was suffering from anxiety, and I'd been doing it for a while now. I was a bit of a zealot to be honest. So, that weekend, our air conditioner broke down, and the supercomputer in the other room was working overtime.

"No one seemed to take that into account. So when the portal opened, it wasn't onto the same universe. It was onto your universe. This was the first time we'd encountered a universe with radically different laws. We'd never seen anything like magic before. More to the point, that world had never seen anything like our portal before. So the most inquisitive of their most powerful beings began to investigate. Ngaboux looked through the hole in their world and saw... me. They could see how the magic, alien to our realm, was starting to spread and change the world. They realised that left unchecked, it would wreak havoc on our reality and probably lead to some bad things happening on their end to. So they looked into the mind of the beings on the other side. Most of the minds were busy and distracted, flitting from thought to thought, feeling to feeling. I was close to the portal, I was just a few metres away, and I was meditating.

"I don't mean to blow my own trumpet here, but I'm pretty good at meditating now. I can spend hours in a state where I almost don't exist or have ego. I was in that state when they looked into my mind. The order and clarity made them decide that it was my mind they'd plunder for their great working. So my tabletop gaming knowledge, my homebrew tweaks, my life spent reading fantasy novels and playing video games were all plundered. I thought it was just one of the mind states I entered into sometimes, like a sort of hallucination. So I went along with it, and now we're stuck with stats, levels, the whole shebang. It was all used as the template for the great working of Ngaboux. They had to make sure it could cope with the unexpected, so they made me their avatar, which allows them to keep a copy of my consciousness on tap to arbitrate edge cases. I'm the Lee in the Lee-Gygax system. But that means I need to stick to my own rules. We're going to have to kill the core.

"The good news is, I have an inkling of where we are now, and what this dungeon is. I don't think anyone's going to like it though, so we're going to equalise with the outside, get out and call for guidance. There's a lot going on here and I need to talk to my God about this."

Ishani sat motionless and tried to absorb what she'd just heard, this was not what she'd been taught in the academy.