"Oh sweetie, it's so good to see you," Helen gushed as she pulled Amanda into a hug. "And you brought Dave as well, and on a weekday!" Amanda's mother snaked an arm around Dave as well, hugging both of them. "Your father will be so pleased to see you; it's been almost a month," Helen said as she guided them both into the kitchen and seated them at the counter.

Dave squeezed Amanda's hand supportively, having had years of experience with her family.

"Roger!" Helen called, "Roger, stop fiddling around and come to the kitchen; Amanda and Dave are here for a visit!"

"So," she continued without pause as she moved around the kitchen, pulling out a pair of mugs as she started a pot of coffee, "Dave, when are you going to make an honest woman of my daughter?"

Amanda groaned. "Taxes Helen, taxes," Dave replied, squeezing her hand again, "we give the government enough money; if we married, we'd end up giving them two or three percent more."

Amanda's parents were very conservative, and they would often rail against the terrible waste and inefficiency of the government, so he knew that argument would give them pause.

"Well, if not a wedding, how about grandchildren?" Helen asked as Roger walked into the room.

"Helen, quit badgering them," he scolded as he placed an arm around his wife and kissed the top of her head.

"I'm not badgering; I'm just asking," Helen protested.

"Sure, sure," Roger agreed, releasing his wife and reaching out to shake Dave's hand before rounding the counter to hug his daughter.

"So what brings you two out here and on a workday no less?" Roger asked, "not that we don't love to see you, but we know you're busy."

"Well," Dave began, looking to Amanda for support, "we're going on a sabbatical for a while, and we were wondering if you'd like to come with us."

"Sabbatical, eh?" Roger snorted, "some sort of extended vacation?"

"More of a working vacation," Amanda said, "but we'll have quite a bit of time off, and we were hoping you'd come to stay with us while we're there, take in the sights, do some hiking, that sort of thing."

"Your father does need to get out a little more," Helen said as she started pouring the freshly brewed coffee, "and so do I suppose. It's getting to the point where I get winded just going around the block."

"Assuming you don't have anything planned for the next couple of weeks, how about you pack a few bags and come with us?" Amanda smiled.

Dave stifled a wince and squeezed Amanda's hand. Her parents were both human lie detectors, and if they pushed too hard, they'd start asking questions.

"Where would be going?" Roger asked.

"North," Dave replied, "there's actually a glacier at the mouth of the valley where we'll be staying, so you'll want to pack a jacket as well as a windbreaker and definitely your hiking boots," he suggested. "It's rustic and beautiful; the night sky is really something to see."

"That does sound nice, doesn't it, dear?" Helen looped her arm through her husband's, "get away from the bustle of the city for a little while, do some hiking, maybe even a little fishing?"

Dave and Amanda both smiled, knowing that Roger loved to hike and fish but had a hard time being away from Helen to do it.

While it did feel a trifle dishonest to Dave, he knew that having them over on Thayland would be a blessing. Helen had been Roger's right hand as both his wife and his assistant, keeping him on task and on schedule while he ran a very successful conglomerate of farms. They would both be valuable additions to... whatever they were calling this.

"Raul," Jack said warmly as he reached across the table to shake the man's hand, "how have you been?"

"Not nearly as well as you," Raul's eyes crinkled as he smiled, "I heard you finished the project with flying colors."

Jack grinned right back and slid an ice-cold Bud Light over to Raul. "That I did, and yeah, all those long days finally paid off."

"Which is kind of why I'm here," Jack continued, "I sort of fell into another project as soon as I finished, and while the payout is unbelievable, the guy setting it up has no idea what he's doing."

Raul's smile widened, "So you're looking for a good crew to build the foundations, and you thought of your buddy Raul," he chuckled before taking a long draw from his bottle.

"Raul, while I haven't worked with a lot of people yet," Jack admitted, "you have definitely stood out."

"Always good to be appreciated," Raul accepted the compliment, "so what's the job?"

"A series of towers," Jack replied, "the guy has the resources, but I have to get a civil engineer to go over the plans. Near as I can figure, we're looking at building a hundred stories up, which means we'll need to drop the foundations pretty deep."

Raul whistled softly, "Never built anything that high, but I know the math; you'll need to go about ten stories deep with the foundation," he squinted thoughtfully at the ceiling for a moment before taking another drink. "Figure you're going to be going into bedrock, hopefully fairly quickly," he mumbled, then shook his head. "I'd need a lot more information, and I'd need to sit down with architects and an engineer who has worked with those kinds of heights before."

"Well," Jack waved at the waitress and held up two fingers, signaling for another round, "Tell you what, if you don't have anything going on, how about I introduce you this afternoon?"

Raul emptied his bottle and let out a satisfied sigh. "If we're meeting him this afternoon, we should probably stop after this next round."

The waitress arrived with another pair of cold bottles.

"So not to put you on the spot, but what's this job looking like in terms of pay?" Raul asked, "and can I bring my own crew in?"

"Well," Jack leaned forward as he lowered his voice, "let me lead with this; would you do the job if it meant you got your hand back?"

Raul recoiled, and Jack saw the flash of hurt in his eyes. Reaching out, Jack caught his good hand. "I'm serious, Raul. This is real. Come with me this afternoon, and I swear to you that you'll walk away with two good hands."

"That's a cruel thing to offer," Raul replied hotly.

"Not if I can deliver," Jack retorted, "and I can. Or rather, I know someone who can and will. Take the job or not; you'll say your prayers tonight with both hands."

Raul eyed him, and Jack smiled sincerely. He'd built a relationship with Raul based on mutual trust.

"Alright," Raul conceded, "but let's be clear if this is some sort of sick joke, you and I are done."

Jack clinked his bottle against Raul's. "We'll be closer than ever," he promised, "now let's talk about civil engineers. We both had to clean up after Martin's mess, so he's off the list, and honestly, he's the only one I've met."

"I'm outtie," Vera announced as she tossed her badge on her boss's desk.

Mark looked up in surprise. "What?"

"Out, done, quitting," Vera supplied helpfully as she tossed a USB stick on the desk after her badge. "Here's the rest of the code for my part, it's a little rough," she shrugged, "but it'll get the job done, and Sarah was going to go over everything at the end anyway, to make sure it was 'homogenous,'" she finished with air quotes.

"Dude," Mark said slowly, "you're just gonna bail out? You know the big payday only lands after we present the entire thing as fully functional."

"Something came up," Vera apologized. She really did like Mark; he was a good boss and handled the management of half a dozen cranky and eccentric code monkeys with patience and grace. "A friend needs my help," she explained, "so I gotta go, I'm not going to be in the country for a while, so I can't even wrap things up remotely."

Mark sighed and hung his head in defeat. "Alright," he conceded, "if your code is sorted, I won't try to hold you on it. Just check your emails whenever you end up near civilization, yeah? Just in case there's something I'm too dumb to figure out."

Vera stifled a grin at that. She knew that he really meant something Sarah was too stupid to figure out, as Mark was almost as good at coding as she was.

"I'll keep an eagle eye, just don't expect to hear from me right away," she promised before blowing him a kiss and heading out the door.

Her habit of coding ahead and feeding her part of a project back in carefully measured chunks was born from participating in too many endeavors where she wound up doing eighty percent of the work, but in this instance, it was paying unexpected dividends.

She had decided to get the easy part of her day done early. Now she had to explain to her mom that she was going to disappear for a while.

David and Amanda had decided to rope their parents in, but Vera had no such illusions. Her mom was busy with her work and her kid sister. Neither of them would appreciate her yanking them out of their lives, and honestly, they weren't good candidates for monster slaying. She'd bring them over to Thayland before Bob's prophesied apocalypse.

Still, before she did that, she had to do a little shopping. She'd rather have been able to order online, as Home Depot was going to cost a bit more, but she needed her plex server. Bob hadn't indicated any weight limit as far as what he could bring through the portal, so a generator with a barrel of fuel hopefully wouldn't be an issue. She didn't know where to get solar panels or the equipment needed to convert the panel's power to charge the batteries she'd need, so she'd decided to go for good old-fashioned gasoline.

Someone more ecologically conscious would no doubt figure out the whole solar and battery thing sooner or later, but until then, Vera wasn't going to go without her entertainment.

Bob walked into the tavern, where he found Mike chatting amiably with Talima.

"So, another world, with monsters," Mike said, turning to face Bob.

"Yeah, pretty much," Bob replied.

"And magic," Mike clarified.

"All sorts of magic," Bob confirmed.

"And apparently the magic of this universe is invading ours, and at some point in the next year and a half, our world is going to suddenly start producing Godzilla style monsters, and the only way to avoid everyone dying is to evacuate them to this world until the monsters disappear after a hundred and ten days, which is oddly specific," Mike narrowed his eyes.

"It's a lot to take in," Bob admitted, "and I know that I'm asking you, hell, everyone, to take a lot of it on faith, but I've shown quite a bit of extraordinary evidence, haven't I?"

"You could have started me off with the bag of holding," Mike grumbled while he pointed at the bag in front of Talima.

Bob paused. He hadn't had one made up, but he could have. "You're not wrong," Bob said, "and I freely admit that I'm not the best person for this." He shrugged uncomfortably, "But I'm all there is until I get some of the people from Earth leveled up and recruiting."

Mike waved a hand at him, "I get that you're doing the best you can with what you've got," he grumbled, "what I really wanted to talk to you about was this whole healing thing you've got going on."

Bob sat down at the table. "I have a spell called regenerate, which when I cast as a ritual, which requires mana crystals, which you only get from killing monsters, will cure cancer, regrow limbs, organs, and pretty much fix whatever is wrong with someone." He paused, then added, "Except old age, that's handled by another ritual, reincarnate, which I don't have, and is a bit more complicated."

"What would it take to regenerate four guys?" Mike asked. Bob wasn't entirely sure, but he thought there was a touch of hope in his voice.

"Four hundred crystals and four hundred seconds," Bob replied calmly. He'd asked Trebor about using regenerate as an area of effect or a barrage, but apparently, the ritual had a feedback component when it read the target's pattern before engaging that made that impossible. Well, Trebor had said effectively impossible, and Bob hadn't gone any further down that particular rabbit hole.

"What would it take to get you to do that?" Mike asked hopefully.

"If you could get them together so that I could do it all at once, that would be great," Bob began, "but the real thing is, I'm pretty sure if I start regrowing limbs, someone, and by someone I mean the government, is going to notice, and start asking probing questions."

Bob shook his head, "I don't want to be probed. Or prodded, or poked, or cut open, or any of the terrible things that I'm sure one of the alphabet agencies would try to subject me to if they found out."

He sighed, "I'm sure I could avoid that unpleasantness, but then they'd be after me for escaping their custody, and it would just make things so much harder, and honestly? This is already an impossible task."

"So you'd want to stash them over here?" Mike asked.

"Ideally, I'd like to have them become Adventurers, killing monsters and leveling up so that we can build the facilities necessary to keep the population of Earth on ice while the mana tide washes over Earth," Bob replied.

"Killing monsters sounds easier than killing insurgents," Mike snorted, "likely doesn't weigh on you as much either."

Mike squared his shoulders and drew in a deep breath. "I've got four guys who served with me in Iraq," he began, "I was out of action with appendicitis when they caught an IED. Alvarez is missing both legs, Waters is missing an arm, O'Neal is missing pretty much everything between the top of his sternum and his dick, and Freeman is missing his dick."

"You fix them up, and I can guarantee you have five Marines who will happily slaughter monsters on your behalf," Mike grinned, "especially as you're trying to save the citizens of the United States."

"To be fair," Bob smiled back, "I'm trying to save everyone on Earth."

"And good on you for it," Mike replied, "But you'll have to forgive us for focusing on the United States."

Bob shrugged, "I'm sure that whoever ends up coming over from other countries is going to feel the same way," he sighed, "hopefully we can cooperate, or at least not actively fuck each other over."

"You know," Mike said thoughtfully, "you've got that magic that reverses age?"

"Reincarnation," Bob confirmed, "it eats five to ten years off your lifespan, but yeah, it'll take an eighty-year-old and kick him back to eighteen or so."

"If you combine that with the whole regeneration thing, I can think of two or three dozen brothers who drink their evenings at the VFW away. Vietnam, for the most part, and a couple from Korea. We lost our last WWII brother a few years ago," Mike explained, "there are quite a few guys who don't have anything left except an empty house and bad memories."

"How about I get your friends back up and going, and you try out the Dungeon? Get a feel for it first? I need more people, a lot more people, but I also want people to know what they're getting into," Bob hedged.

"Deal," Mike replied, "take us back to Earth, and I'll have them together in a few hours."

"That works," Bob pulled a sack of crystals from his inventory, "I'm due to bring the rest of the group back this afternoon anyway."

A portal twisted into being in the tavern. Bob gestured to Mike, who hesitated for only a second before walking through.

"Be back in a few hours," Bob said to Talima, then followed the Detective back to Earth.