Serenity was startled out of his concentration on directing the Legion Soldiers to explore the blank parts of Aide’s map when the door to the suite opened. He’d been waiting a while, long enough that he’d checked in on Jenna repeatedly, but Blaze seemed happy watching the child. Serenity wasn’t really sure what to do with a month-old baby other than keep her clean, warm, and fed; he was pretty sure she was supposed to have more toys than they had available but there weren’t a lot of options.

Rissa was the first through the door. She charged towards Serenity and enveloped him in a hug.

Serenity grinned and held Rissa tightly but carefully. “I’m glad you’re back safe! No problems, I hope?” As he asked the question, his attention drifted to the clock Aide always kept running for him. “Wait, what took you five hours? Did something happen?”

Serenity hadn’t noticed anything on Rissa, so he looked over at the others. They were all moving well and there were no obvious injuries, though there was blood on Sillon’s armor that Serenity didn’t remember.

“Ah, no major issues. A bit of a fight on the way out of the Palace but nothing we couldn’t handle.” Oddly enough, it wasn’t Rissa that answered; it was Sillon. He didn’t look at Serenity as he spoke; instead, he stared at the ground.

It reminded Serenity of someone trying to avoid saying something, so he glanced at the others. They were watching Sillon. “Okay, do I want to know what you aren’t saying?”

“Uh, no?” Sillon looked up at Serenity as he said that.

Serenity smiled and shook his head. “All right then, just make sure you’re all checked out by Blaze tonight. Did you get a lot of … wait, where’s Ekari?” Serenity doublechecked. Rissa, Sillon, Kerr, and Ita were all there. Ekari wasn’t.

Rissa chuckled into Serenity’s shoulder. “I didn’t think we’d get away with it for long. She’s with the cart.”

“Cart?” Serenity glanced between the faces of his friends, who were all grinning, even Ita. “Did you get that much stuff?”

“Yep!” Rissa straightened herself, clearly eager to show him. “And we don’t all have infinite space we can tuck things in, unlike you, so we had to find a way to transport it. C’mon!”

Serenity let his fiancee lead him out of the building and around to the back entrance. It was bigger and clearly made for taking deliveries, though Serenity had only seen a few in the time they’d been in the building, mostly food. Ekari was indeed waiting there, but there wasn’t one cart with her. Instead, there were three vehicles. One was a cargo flyer, tethered to the back of one of the two actual wagons. All three seemed to be magically powered.

That made sense. The standard on Aeon was magic, not horses. Horses were far more common on Lyka, but still less common than draft animals on Zon.

“Do you think you can fit the flyer? It’s slow but I think it could be really useful.” Rissa rushed over to it and disconnected it from the wagon. “It’s not made to be ridden; it’s made to be pulled.”

Serenity could just imagine that. Cargo flyers hooked together like semi trailers, traveling long distances across a world. He was pretty sure it would happen on Earth in time, though the cargo flyers would probably look a lot more like semi trailers than the oval-shaped open-topped cargo flyer. After all, why waste the magic on shielding when you could just build a thin shell and even make it easier to heat and cool?

Actually, he was pretty sure he’d seen that in his life-that-never-was. He couldn’t remember where or when but the scene sounded familiar. All he was certain of was that it wasn’t on Earth.

Serenity walked up to the cargo flyer. He wasn’t certain if it would fit through his Rift or not. It certainly wouldn’t fit through at the size he usually opened, but that size was adjustable, at least to an extent. He wouldn’t fit through at the normal size either but it was easy to expand it enough to step through. “Can you get ready to push it through? I normally handle that but I normally don’t put through anything I can’t move on my own.”

“You’re not going to unpack it first?” Ekari’s question pulled his attention away from the large collection of stuff.

Serenity shrugged. “Should I? I assumed it was just valuables. Is there anything on there that will be either dangerous if it waits or useful if it doesn’t?”

Ekari started laughing. “Just valuables? You are the least dragonlike dragon I’ve ever heard of. Aren’t dragons supposed to hoard stuff?”

Serenity shrugged. “Dragons vary like people I guess. Money’s useful, but its value is in what you can do with it, not the money itself.” He’d probably have someone else take care of selling it all and turning it into a useful currency. Blaze, perhaps; from what Rissa had said about their trip, he was good at that sort of thing and he’d probably enjoy it too. It wouldn’t be on Aeon, however, that was for sure.

Perhaps he’d have Blaze set some aside for Jenna. It seemed reasonable; she was born on Aeon instead of Earth because of Lykandeon’s actions, his palace could pay for her higher education or something. Perhaps a fun trip after graduation would be better, it could be whatever she wanted.

The thought of family made Serenity frown at Ekari. “Wait. Why haven’t you gone to check on your Mom? You don’t have to guard the wagons now, we can handle it.”

Ekari looked down. “I will after we’re done here. I, Blaze, I…” She shook her head and seemed to gather her thoughts before she looked back up at Serenity. If he didn’t know her well, he’d have thought she was glaring at him; as it was, he knew she was glaring at nothing so solid. “I don’t want to know about how hurt she is, about what Blaze couldn’t heal. I know I need to, but I want to put it off just a bit longer.”

Serenity could understand that.

He waited a moment, letting her words hang in the air, then figured it was time to talk about something a bit less emotionally charged. Blaze hadn’t said much about Karin, and he didn’t know if that was a good thing, a bad thing, or simply Blaze respecting Karin’s privacy. Whichever it was, Serenity didn’t need to tell Ekari about it. “So, does that mean you’d prefer that we inventory the takings before we go in? We can do that if you want. It’ll be faster to get the whole load back out if it goes in on the flyer but I think it’ll be easier to open the portal for just the flyer instead of everything.”

Ekari stared at Serenity for a moment before she nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we should. That way we know what we have.”

Serenity couldn’t tell which reason was more important to Ekari, but there certainly wasn’t a reason not to inventory everything. They had the time.

They had everything from fancy, hand-woven tapestries to exquisite jewelry to a wide assortment of enchanted items, though most of the enchanted items were unpowered. Very few of the items were useful in combat; even the ones that were potentially useful were definitely the fancy version that was worn on formal occasions rather than the equipment someone actually took to war.

None of it was inexpensive. Serenity couldn’t make anything approaching an estimate for how much it was worth; it was the sort of thing he hadn’t been able to afford until he was well past the point where he’d have had any use for it as Vengeance. A few of the smaller trinkets might have been dungeon-made but almost everything else was hand-crafted, which added to its value.

The item Serenity found the most valuable was not the one that would sell for the most; that was a gem-studded tapestry woven using magically enhanced valuable metals that (when appropriately powered) would allow one person to achieve an extreme level of focus on something of their choice. As useful as that could be for things like creating rituals or enhancing Affinities and Concepts, it paled in comparison to the time-locked vault about the size of a walk-in freezer.

The time lock wasn’t set; in fact, the others used it as a storage chest when they moved everything. They knew it was magical and safe to use since it was clearly unpowered, without a monster core in any of the available slots. They assumed it was valuable, since there were a number of different slots for cores, and that meant it could potentially use a lot of magic. Serenity knew what it did, however, and knew just how valuable it could be.

One of the settings was an external time lock, sort of like a bank vault. Once closed, it could only be opened either at or after (depending on the settings) a specific time. A time lock set to “two hours” was easy to wait for, while a time lock set for “exactly midnight” was a bit more of a pain. A time lock set to “a day before the alignment of the five inner planets”, however, could be a real pain to wait for; the Final Reaper had dealt with time locks like that a few times.

While that setting could be useful, it wasn’t something Serenity was interested in. He was interested in the fact that it could also be set up with an interior time lock. In effect, it could “freeze” time when the vault was closed. Unlike most forms of Time manipulation, it didn’t just dilate it. Instead, it simply said that the now when the vault was closed was the same as the now when it was opened again.

Like most Time magic, it was completely bullshit magic as far as Serenity was concerned. Stretching it out or compressing it he could understand; that made sense if you thought of Time as a waveform, and almost anything could be modeled as a waveform. Completely breaking it in a true discontinuity that somehow said it wasn’t one, however, was just nonsense. He knew he’d have to get over that some day and start learning how it actually worked if he ever wanted to get his SpaceTime Concept up to where it should be, but it just didn’t make sense to him.

The only good thing about the design was that it couldn’t invert the internal time lock. More time couldn’t pass inside the vault than passed outside the vault; in fact, if it was internally time-locked, no time could pass inside the vault at all. Serenity knew that was a feature of the enchantment on the vault rather than the Time affinity, but it still made him feel better about it.

Impossible magic or not, it was useful magic, especially since it was possible to set both an internal and an external time lock and make them dependent on each other, so that the vault would freeze time and automatically open some time later, unfreezing itself. He probably wouldn’t use that feature all that often, but it was a good one.

Honestly, what he’d probably use it for was what it resembled: a walk-in freezer, except that this freezer maintained the temperature and condition of whatever he put in it. He probably wouldn’t use it as a time capsule or a prison, though he’d heard of time vaults being used as both.

The complete inventory took hours, but sliding everything into the Rift didn’t take long. Serenity had less trouble than he’d expected fitting the cargo flyer; in the end, he ended up storing both of the wagons as well. After all, why not?