Serenity, Rissa, and Russ were met at the small airport by two policemen and a man in a black suit. “Mr. Rothmer?”

Serenity turned towards the speaker, who turned out to be the man in a suit. “Yes?”

“Can you spare a few minutes? I need to talk to you, and I’d rather keep this polite.” The man looked straight at Serenity and didn’t indicate the policemen flanking him at all.

Serenity had no idea what was going on, but “polite” sounded good. “Sure. Is there-”

“It’ll be all three of us,” Russ interrupted. “But we’ll be happy to talk to you here at the airport.” There might have been an emphasis on the word “talk”.

Serenity could have sworn the man grinned for just a moment. What was that about?

“There’s a lounge this way; it should be empty. By the way, I’m Agent Price.”

As Agent Price led the way to the lounge, Serenity was more and more convinced he was happy about something. There was a bounce to his step.

Once they sat down, Agent Price explained why he was there. “As you’re probably aware, former Secretary Rothmer is currently under investigation for misuse of his office.”

Serenity tried not to react. He was aware, but that didn’t make him happy about it. As far as he could tell, all his father had done was try to do his job to the best of his ability.

When no one else said anything, Agent Price continued. “Some of the things he’s being investigated have to do directly with you. This is where I would normally tell you not to leave the country, but that’s not an option in your case.”

Serenity didn’t say anything; he was pretty sure this was getting close to the point where he should be asking for a lawyer, but they hadn’t actually told him what they wanted yet.

A complicated expression crossed Agent Price’s face. Serenity couldn’t read it; he hoped that either Rissa or Russ could. Rissa, at least, should be able to. “Instead, we’d like to propose a deal. Stay out of the country until the investigation’s complete unless we ask you to return and accept a companion on your travels to watch you.”

Serenity wasn’t thrilled by the idea of having a minder, but staying out of the country for a while shouldn’t be a problem; all of the US portals were closed, and most of the Canadian ones were as well. He was about to say that when Russ interrupted silently. :Don’t accept.:

While Serenity was trying to figure out what Russ had a problem with, Russ leaned forward and grinned at Agent Price. “We’ll need that in writing, of course. Serenity’s lawyer will need to look it over before he agrees to anything. I have the feeling there are going to be some clarifications needed. Such as what he gets out of agreeing to it.”

:That’s not actually the most important one,: Russ explained as Serenity watched Agent Price’s smile fade. :The most important one has to do with when exactly you’re allowed to enter and leave the country. Asking why we should agree at all is a good negotiating tactic; so far, they haven’t shown either the carrot or the stick, and I want to know what basis they have for this.:

This was why Serenity hated politics.

“We’ll have it waiting for you when you reach New York City,” was Agent Price’s reply.

The whole thing threw a serious kink in Serenity’s plans, as his lawyer immediately advised him not to leave New York City until he’d had time to look over the agreement with another lawyer who specialized in criminal law.

Four days later, Serenity was still in Aki’s dungeon. He’d had more time than he needed to clean then examine the artifact he’d taken from the Mind Thief. Unlike with spellwork, he couldn’t identify the source of a crafted item by looking at it, but he could tell that it wasn’t simple.

Katya couldn’t either, but she told him to hang on to it until her family arrived; apparently one of her aunts was good at figuring out who made stuff.

Serenity couldn’t leave it alone. When he looked at it, he wanted to eat it. It didn’t take him long to figure out why with Katya’s help: it was essentially a giant battery, with a framework to limit how quickly mana was pulled out of it. She said it would work with all sorts of things, but it had to be something both big and long-lasting to need hundreds of monster cores of different sizes.

She said she’d never seen a monster core as large as the biggest, which was nearly fist-sized. Serenity had; he’d seen bigger. They tended to be found in the larger monsters, and while there was a relationship between size and power, larger didn’t always mean stronger. This one was very strong, and it was everything Serenity could do to stop himself from eating it in front of Katya.

When he was alone again, the decision was simple. He was low on Ev, and the monster cores would provide it. The smallest ones weren’t worth much, only a point or two each, but the largest one gave him about 40,000 Ev on its own. Finding that out brought its own consequences: he wasn’t hungry for anything for four days. Fortunately, most of the time was in a Tutorial and didn’t really count, even if it did make Blaze ask what was wrong with him.

In the Tutorial, he had time to think. The cores were valuable, but Serenity didn’t mind turning that value into future attribute points, because there was no way for him to use them. They were only a threat to him if they were seen. No one would believe he was strong enough to kill a monster with that large a core; it had to be Tier Ten at the minimum. Tier Twenty was probably a more reasonable guess, and that meant he’d both never get its true value and open himself up to people who wanted to see what else he might have.

No, eating them was the right choice. Serenity knew that decision was influenced by his desire for them, but he’d taken the time to step back and think about it while they weren’t in front of him and he thought he’d managed to make the best decision. By the time he was powerful enough to realistically spend them and had a place where he could redeem them for something approaching their real value, he’d be able to hunt more himself.

He decided to instead keep a bunch of the mid-range ones, things that might be collected by people at Tier Four or Five if they were very lucky (or Eight to Ten normally). Those would be valuable offplanet, but wouldn’t endanger his life if he showed them, as long as he was careful. He might even have a chance to get something close to their value.

It was time to be thinking about heading offplanet, unfortunately, and Serenity wanted to be prepared when he did.

When he returned from the Tutorial, he went to go find Rissa.

When he found her, she was over at Raz’s - or more accurately, she was over at Aki’s. She was talking to the dungeon core about “reality television” when Serenity walked in. If he understood her point correctly, she was proposing setting up a blog covering how to properly build a dungeon?

“What are you two talking about? How could you show how to build a dungeon? I thought we were trying to keep Aki secret.” Any good blog show would have to show the process, and there was no way to do that and still be sure Aki stayed secret. Not with how unique Aki was; someone would recognize the area.

:I made an assumption,: Aki admitted. :You know that Dungeon Core Anchor you picked up a few weeks ago?:

Serenity remembered it all too clearly. It was from one of the six dungeons he’d had to kill in Europe; four of them had been dungeons that were already marked as “too dangerous to enter”, while the other two were ones that had been hiding. None of them had been even as coherent as the Corn Maze Dungeon, and they’d all been intent on killing everyone who entered.

The four that were known but too dangerous had been replaced with new dungeons. Serenity didn’t tell anyone that they were linked to him, though he was certain the rest of his party had probably guessed. Aki probably also knew; she was on Gaia’s network and knew him - and Gaia knew he trusted her.

In the first dungeon, he’d found a setting that let him set up a ‘default basic’ dungeon of its type. It then gave him an ‘Authorized Alteration Token’, which he’d handed to the people controlling the dungeon in each case. He was certain that the four ‘basic dungeons’ were based on a dungeon somewhere else, but they’d diverge as soon as the tokens were used.

He’d actually been hired for the last three, after he took care of the first one. It was the only one that was publicly known; the other three were all in private hands and their owners were very, very happy to have a dungeon they could partially control. The fact that he could override any or all of their settings from any crystal linked to Gaia’s network didn’t seem like something to advertise.

Serenity had seen no reason to keep the two unknown dungeons as dungeons. One of them left behind an old journal written in a language Serenity didn’t recognize while the other became a Dungeon Core Anchor. He wasn’t certain what it was for, but his best guess was that it could be placed at a Nexus to make a new Dungeon Core.

Serenity nodded and pulled it back from his Rift to the ordinary world, setting it on the table next to Aki. “Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about it. I meant to give it to you, to see if you could use it as another Core for yourself. Do you need it? Can Raz use it, is that what you’re talking about?”

:That’s actually a really interesting idea. Rissa was proposing that Raz set up a dungeon somewhere and video blog through setting it up. There are a number of unoccupied ley line nexuses nearby, I can have Gaia pick the one that needs something the most.: Aki spoke the words “video blog” carefully, as though she were still figuring them out. :I’m not sure if he can Bind to more than one dungeon or not, but it should be possible. Still, if I can be there with him to help, that would be useful. If I can make it a true subsidiary Core, that would be even better. I don’t really need more people inside me, but a way to more easily hand out treasure and have people fight monsters would be useful. But are you sure you want to just give it away?:

Serenity shrugged. “It’s just sitting there for me. I don’t really need a Dungeon Core Anchor for anything I can think of.”

“That can’t be why you came in here.” Rissa walked around the table and hugged Serenity. “Did you need something?”

Serenity wasn’t sure how to begin. “Yeah. Um. You know how I’ve been worrying about the future?”

Rissa nodded. “About how to prevent the destruction of the planet, yeah. I thought we’d agreed not to worry about that until the portals were all closed?”

“We’re more than halfway there, and that means it’s time to plan for what comes next.” Serenity didn’t want to say what was next, but it was better to just bite the bullet. “I think I’m going to need to go offworld. I don’t know where yet, but somewhere stronger than Earth. I need to figure out what I’m doing and I need to spend time in an atmosphere that isn’t draining me.”

More than that, he was tired of feeling vaguely achy all the time. It went away when he went to a Tutorial, which told him it was definitely the planet. He’d put up with it if it was necessary, but he was convinced the answer to Earth’s problem didn’t lie on Earth, though there was a piece that definitely did.

“Is that all this is?” Rissa seemed relieved as she smiled. “I’ll come with you, then. When you walked in here feeling so worried, I thought something terrible had happened. We can plan for leaving the planet. First you need to figure out where you need to go, then we can work from there.”