Jeff Rosenthal shook his head. “I’ve seen that video. I’m really not sure what to say, she shouldn’t have-”

“It’s fine.” Rissa was smiling as she spoke. “We know it wasn’t really her. If we planned to be difficult, we wouldn’t have accepted meeting you here. We’re going to get some of those questions eventually. I just wasn’t ready.” She seemed almost embarrassed as she looked down, away from the reporter.

Serenity moved up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t have any reason to be embarrassed as far as he was concerned. “We should talk about this area. You’ve probably heard about the strange animals people have been seeing?”

Serenity turned away from the reporter and gestured towards Aki’s dungeon. “Follow me. We can talk while we walk; it’ll be a bit before we get to the high magic area.”

“Is there a difference between a high magic zone and a high magic area?” Jeff followed behind Serenity on the trail. “I had zone written down from the conversation this morning.”

Serenity hadn’t expected the first real question to be semantics. “Not really? I mean, a zone’s just an area that can be distinguished from other areas, isn’t it? Zone might be the better word.”

“For people who can see magic, at least. The rest of us can’t tell where it is.” Jeff was clearly quick on the uptake; it was like he’d practiced the comeback.

Serenity chuckled. “Give it a little time, once it’s settled it’ll be obvious; different things will grow and thrive inside. Everything in there right now is stuff that could live outside, but that’ll change. Of course as the planet grows, even less magical areas will have higher mana concentrations.”

“As the planet grows?” The reporter’s voice sounded farther away than before, and when Serenity turned back to look, he saw that Jeff had stopped and was staring at him. “Is that even possible? Wouldn’t there be lots of earthquakes and stuff?”

Serenity had planned to mention it during the interview, but he hadn’t really expected it to come so early. He remembered the consternation it caused the first time. Even though Vengeance really didn’t pay much attention, he’d still heard all about the changes to his home planet.

More than that, it was clearly laid out as something that happened in the Instructor’s Guide. There wasn’t that much information on it, but it was there. “Surely someone’s mentioned it after the Tutorial? I know Planetary changes - growth, shrinking, or even becoming an odd shape - are common after integration. I’m pretty sure that was mentioned?”

Maybe it hadn’t been mentioned. No, surely it had been. It was probably in one of the early sessions when everything was strange to people; things would blur together then.

The reporter’s confused look told him that whether or not it was mentioned, he really needed to say more. “Look at it this way. Magic is intent. That’s what it is and what it does. You could call it belief if you prefer. Belief’s a powerful thing. If enough people believe something, well - with magic, it can be true. How many people it needs depends on a lot of factors, but there are over seven billion people on Earth. For something as simple as the planet is big or the planet is a sphere, that’s a lot of belief, even if most people don’t spend much time thinking about it. Places people think of as big will tend to get bigger, while places that people think of as small will tend to shrink.”

“And you think that will make the planet get bigger?” Jeff’s voice matched the expression of disbelief on his face. It was overstated enough that Serenity couldn’t miss it, which meant it was clearly there for effect. Serenity wondered if that was simply acting or if there was a reason behind it.

Serenity really didn’t like playing that sort of game, so he decided to treat it as genuine.

Serenity smiled. He thought it would make the planet get a lot bigger, especially since he was saying it would. People tended to believe what they were told by someone who should know, after all. “That’s what I’ve gathered from information on past integrations.”

“Where are you getting this information?” That must be the question Jeff had been leading up to.

Fortunately, Serenity had his answer ready. “There’s a book all instructors get, An Instructor’s Guide to Integrating New Worlds. It covers a lot of details.”

“Can you share a copy?”

Serenity didn’t think that would be a good idea unless a couple of the sections were stripped - especially the section on excessively dangerous magic. For a lot of people, that would be an invitation to practice it rather than a warning. It certainly had been for Vengeance when he ran into the same information somewhat later.

Serenity cast his attention at the Voice. Is there a reason there isn’t a student guide or something?

[Literacy is not assumed. For your planet it might be useful. You will need to assemble it the next time you are in a Tutorial]

There was another good reason to enter a Tutorial - and soon. He was going to have to bite the bullet.

He also needed to answer the reporter. Serenity forced a smile and looked in Jeff’s eyes. “I’ll try to put something together and see if I can get the Voice to make copies the next time I’m in a Tutorial.”

The path had finally reached the dungeon, and Serenity was finally able to relax. Mana and essence didn’t flow into him here they way they did in a ley line, but they also weren’t continually pulled away from him. Until the past few days, which he’d been able to spend mostly in his new home in the dungeon, he hadn’t realized just how wearing that was.

“How worried should we be?” Jeff’s question seemed incomplete, and Serenity wasn’t certain what it referred to.

“About what?”

Jeff didn’t respond immediately. When he did, it still wasn’t as clear as his previous questions had been. “About everything? All of this?”

That was a big question. Serenity had to pick how to answer it. “It depends on who you are and where you are. This is a big change, and change is frightening even when it’s mostly good. This is an opportunity to shape who you are in a way we haven’t had before. That’s - for a lot of people, that’s amazing. Like all opportunities, though, it comes at a price. That price is simple - if we want to keep what we have and what we gain, we have to do it. For most people, life won’t really change that much unless we lose.”

The problem was balance. Serenity had to make sure that people knew there was danger but that it could be prepared for without terrifying people. If he told people the world would be destroyed in ten years, all too many people would give up. He’d already shown that the world could be changed; he’d done it on Tzintkra and he’d done it again on Earth when he closed the first invasion portal far earlier than in the original timeline, even if the Voice was still refusing to tell him New York City was saved, even though it had counted towards the quest.

Serenity pulled up his Quests to check again.

[Global Quest: Permanently deal with all Invasion Portals and remove the threat of the invaders]

[Quest Status: 13/512]

Two more since that morning. Serenity was fairly confident that the portals closing weren’t because people were truly defeating the invaders; instead, they were invasion groups that either had achieved their objectives or were facing more opposition than expected and had cut their losses. A portal closing in less than two months was unusual, and he’d closed the first one in more like two weeks. Serenity could understand why less confident (or less desperate) invaders might simply give up and return home.

It didn’t really change the overall problem much. Anyone leaving now would be someone who wouldn’t have fought that hard or that well anyway.

“You’ve seen the Global Quest. Most people are going to be somewhere near an invasion, since invasions will tend to happen near cities and water. If you’re unlucky, you’ll get caught in it. If we can contain them and push them back, though, most people will be fine.”

Serenity smiled, remembering one of the questions Rissa had presented to him to think about before the interview. “Your coffee, tea, chocolate, or whatever luxury you love will be fine as long as we win. If we do this right and do it quickly, we can prevent major disruptions. Don’t run out and buy all the toilet paper you can get, either, that will only cause more disruptions.”

Jeff laughed at that one. For some reason there had been a run on toilet paper about a week earlier, and some stores were still rationing it.

“What about the internet? We all depend on it, can it last through this?” Jeff seemed to think that was an easy question.

Serenity forced himself not to shake his head. That would be a bad sign. “This is what the internet was designed for. This is why it was designed as a decentralized system, so that it could deal with disruptions. It’s a different war than the one it was intended for, but many of the same considerations apply.” That was the good news.

Next was bad news, then he needed to do good news again. “Unfortunately, over the past few decades, a lot of the internet has been centralized. There are a limited number of data centers where most of the processing and storage is done, and there are a limited number of high-volume routes between major cities. There are good reasons this has happened, but it has reduced the level of redundancy in the system. If we lose too many of those, the internet will still be able to cope - but it may be the internet of your parents’ generation instead of yours.”

Serenity grinned. “Personally, I think we’ll be fine. There’s no reason for data centers or internet lines to be targeted; very few people from outside would even know what they are. On top of that, the advantage of centralization is that we know what needs to be protected.”

It wasn’t as much of an advantage as he was implying; until there were Earth-humans with the knowledge to practically ward the sites and they knew if any of the data centers were built over magical sites, it would be hard to protect them against a small strike team looking for something and destroying what they didn’t understand. Most of the protection would simply be that no one was likely to deliberately target them, which would not have been the case for a more normal war.

Jeff nodded slowly. “Right then. What Path should I take? I haven’t been through the Tutorial yet; how can I choose?”

“You mean that in general, don’t you, not you specifically?” Serenity had a slightly different answer depending on which question Jeff meant.

“Both?”

Serenity sighed. “You wouldn’t be a reporter if you didn’t want to, so I’d recommend something related to that. There are likely to be a lot of options, as long as you’re doing what you want to do. The biggest thing to remember is that you get the most progress on your Path by following it. If you want to fight, take a combat Path. They’re usually fast to level, but they are also dangerous. For a reporter … perhaps you’d want a Path that helps you talk to people, or perhaps a Path that helps you write might be better.” Serenity wasn’t certain exactly what Path that would be, but he knew they existed.

“I thought all of the Paths in the Tutorial were either fighting or crafting?”