"A dragon? But don't they only live in dungeons?" Ishani asked, looking at the sky, as though Lin and Adili seeing the sign of a dragon could summon it. "Do we need to put up some protection?"

"Well, said protection would take somewhat more than a moment to put together if it was going to be effective. The best thing we can do for now is put up an illusion." Wolfgang explained to her. "We did have a weapon that would have been perfect for slaying a dragon with minimal risk, but of course it got left on the other side."

"The Howitzer is not an anti-air gun, we'd have to find the lair and then shell it into the stone age. Wait, that's probably in the future here. Well you know what I mean." Chris responded. "I'll go and put up an illusion of what was here when we first arrived. Shouldn't take me more than half an hour."

That evening Ishani sat waiting for Lin and Adili to return. She picked at her food and kept looking at the door.

"Give over that faffing" Chris said from behind the counter. "They'll not be here before morning at the earliest. Tomorrow afternoon if they're wise and have a sleep. The danger isn't any greater now than it was then, and frankly they're in less of it than us. They'll be travelling through the thick forest, under cover. We're the ones sat out on the banks of a lake up on a mountain. So eat your food, go and watch a movie and relax. On that note, the children's movies are gone too, needed the space!"

"Can you not tell us before you do it, so we can save some to our laptops, if we ever get to use them." asked Wolfgang plaintively. "You deleted the Lord of the Rings trilogy without even letting me or Ishani know. That's cultural imperialism you know."

"For the last time, those were people in make up and camera tricks for the dwarfs. I know, they were made before the bridge. I saw them in the cinema! It's not cultural anything for you. I can make some claim because it was written in the UK, but even that's tenuous. I left you The Hobbit. That's got a dragon in it. Completely different to a real dragon, but it's as close to the real thing as Gimli was to you."

"Hey, Chris, do you remember the blue dragon we fought in that ruined temple dungeon?"

Ishani's ears perked up. If they'd fought a dragon before and won, maybe there wasn't much to be gained by worrying all the time. What a wet behind the ears greenhorn she must seem to be.

"That was a wyvern, and it was a runt. You've got no experience fighting a true dragon." Chris responded. "Don't worry though, we know it exists and as far as we can tell, it doesn't know we exist. That means we have the advantage. With a little preparation, we can set up a killing zone. It won't be easy, this dragon is probably a few centuries old at least. I did a run through the images my laptop captured while we were away. There were signs of something out there. I thought it was a golden eagle or the like, but maybe it was a dragon. Hard to tell, it was always far away and at the edge of the image. I pointed it north-east, and they found the scale almost due west. We're probably at the very edge of its range." He turned his head to Ishani, his golden mane rippling in the yellow light from the fixture above him. "This is actually really good news. There's basically no chance this dragon is native, even if there's been magic here for a millennium or more. That means it's a dungeon native, and that's exactly what we're looking for. I'd place money on its nest being near the dungeon's Gate. Better than that is the fact that the magic level seems invariant as far as we have explored. That means the local area is saturated, combined with the presence of the dragon... Well the models I've got show a very high likelihood of the Gate being less than a hundred clicks to the south of us.

"And the good news doesn't stop there. We've not even been here a week, and I've worked out why you," he pointed at Ishani, "needed to be in your elven form. You're now a creature entirely of your home realm. That means you are connected to it, albeit through two Gates, one of them being the portable. Which means I can measure the variability of the magical flux you emit. We all have our own emissions, tied to our realms. That means I can compare it to the magic field around us and see if there really is a dungeon or just a bridge to your home realm. Well I did that today and I'm extremely relieved to say that there's no link between the magic here and your magic. The dungeon is definitely the primary source of magic around here. There's a modulation on its rhythm though, but the dragon answers even that. Honestly, this is the best possible outcome we could have hoped for! There's a good chance that the manifestation of the core is the dragon!

"What happened is that, at some point, two dungeons tried to feed on each other, they merged, and then they bumped into this universe. They put out magic, they took in entropy. One of the cores left the dungeon to try and establish this universe as their own. Somehow it worked out how to open the Gate to our universe. So we've got 2 Gates and we almost certainly only need to destroy the core in this world. Which I think is manifesting as the dragon, which explains everything."

Chris sat back and looked extremely pleased with himself, as only a cat can. "Grab some sleep you two. I've got more simulations to run. I've also got this." He reached into his storage and pulled a bottle of golden liquid out. "This is Pendaryn. It's Welsh single malt. I think this is the last bottle in existence. Aged three hundred years. I can think of no finer celebratory drink for slaying the actual dragon on the Welsh flag than this. Honestly I can't wait. We'll have to make do with some Otago, it's from New Zealand. This one is fifty years old and frankly far too good to waste on people younger than it, but I'm an old fool." Saying this he grabbed three cut glass tumblers from his storage, pushed the Pendaryn back into thin air and then pulled out a bottle of a darker liquid. "This is Otago. It's a single malt and each of these litre bottles costs about the same as a small flat's rent for a month. And that's cheap for what you get."

After the whisky had been poured, Ishani and Wolfgang reached out to take theirs while Chris sat back into his chair and lapped his up. "One of the greatest things about being a leonine is that I can taste so much more than I can as a human. The downside is that I look silly drinking whisky."

Ishani couldn't even bring hers to her lips. Normally she liked a whisky, but for some reason it smelt too strongly to her now. "It's burning my eyes" she complained. "I'm not sure I can drink it. I'm sorry, I normally love a good whisky."

Wolfgang sipped his normally and remarked that it wasn't too different from other whiskies. "Have you noticed anything else tasting or smelling strange recently?" He asked, somewhat concerned.

"Don't worry" Chris responded for her, "I should have remembered this, the whole new world thing just got me caught up. She's got full access to an adult elf's senses and she's not had the hundred years to grow into them. Everything must be a bit much right now. Am I right?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed gladly "Everything is too red when I look at it, the sounds of the forest and lake are too loud at night, even plain water tastes of so many things. Will it go away?"

"It will, in a year or so if we let it just happen. I can do a spell to damp it down for now and ramp it up over the next week to get you up to speed though. Would you like me to?"

"Oh gods yes please, I thought I was going mad."

Chris reached out and created a small circle of runes in the air which he then pushed towards her. The lights sank into her forehead and there was a brief shudder than ran through her. She grabbed her tumbler and tried to drink it again. This time the rich flavour was strong, but not overpowering, and the familiar burn as it slid down her throat was welcome.

"Ahh! I needed that. Thank you so much, Chris."

"You're welcome, now get some sleep. You too Wolfgang."

The next morning Ishani awoke to discover that Lin and Adili had arrived during the night. They were both wearing a look of absolute exhaustion, but they were both smiling. "Morning sleepy head." called Adili as he saw her coming into the living area. "Chris has told us what his simulations show. I'm amazed it looks so simple. It'll still get him a Nobel Prize when he gets back though." He picked up what appeared to be another tumbler of the Otago and sipped it.

"Before you get breakfast, take this and throw it through the Gate, would you?" Chris appeared behind Ishani and handed her a memory device as he passed. "This lets the outside know where we're up to, assuming they can get it before we get back.

"Everyone take a rest day. Tomorrow we'll start on the planning and preparation for the hunt. You're going to get a lot of levels Ishani. Even I might level up." He said with a grin as he headed into the kitchen area.