Excerpt from the second draft of An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe

Common Utility Path Abilities (Continued)

Party

The Party skill (also often known as Group or Team) provides a semi-customizable interface with limited Status information on yourself and others in your ‘party’. The amount of information and level of customization available vary widely. There is a single-person variant of this skill that is often obtained instead by those who prefer to work alone.

Party information is restricted to information that the members of your party freely share and what is readily obvious.

Mana Sight

Commonly known to mages and craftsmen, the ability to sense magic in one form or another is relatively self-explanatory. There are different kinds of magical senses for different purposes; not all magic is visible to the most common forms.

Serenity stood in front of the portal once again. He’d found out enough about the surroundings on his trip to be able to tell anyone else who came through that rockfin were most likely to come from uphill and that the water hid a dangerous predator; that was all he’d been looking for.

The assorted equipment he’d brought through on both trips was still running, which meant he had time available to investigate the portal himself.

At a first look, it was magically extremely similar to the “front” side of the other end, but when he took a good look the details were different. There was an obvious hook that would let the portal be closed, to begin with. Serenity carefully didn’t touch it; he didn’t want to be trapped on a world he didn’t know anything about just to close a portal that wasn’t particularly dangerous.

Serenity started tracing the mana flows that came off the closure. If he could learn what they were well enough, he might have a tool that would let him trick a portal into closing itself. That would be better than the brute force method he’d planned to use.

An hour and a half later, Serenity pulled back from the portal. He had a possible method to close a portal from the other side, but he couldn’t be certain it would work without trying it. Even if it did work, he wouldn’t know if it would work on any portal or if it was specific to ones created using the same sort of item this one had been made with. His best guess was that it was somewhere between those two extremes; any portal with a similar closure mechanism could probably be tricked, but he might have to tune it to the individual portal.

In short, it’d take a while to build the spell; he might be able to build it ahead of time for this portal, but that was all.

Serenity rubbed his temples, then checked in with Aide.

Status: Analysis Complete

High-Frequency results match simulation

Low-Frequency results within expected range [time-swap variant]

Serenity took a quick look to see which one that was, and found out that the “time-swap variant” was the one he’d tagged as being the most likely; the pattern seemed to have some information that was always the same; Serenity suspected it was either related to the spell used or a unique portal indicator. Past that, there was a location section; it had two sequences that had changed places when they looked at it from this portal, which meant it was probably origin and destination. It could have been destination and origin, but the readings they’d pulled off the short-range portal pair Serenity had cast almost matched the first set of coordinates in the portal on Earth, so those had to be the origin.

It wouldn’t hurt to take a look at that part of the portal on this side and make sure everything matched; if it did, it wouldn’t take long. If it didn’t match, Serenity would learn something.

It didn’t match. More accurately, it mostly matched. Almost everything Serenity had expected was there, but there was also an additional section. A section with outputs that weren’t connected. The problem was that Serenity wasn’t certain what the outputs were. Instead of chasing that, he decided to look for the missing pieces; what was missing that he’d expected to see?

It took Serenity a few minutes to figure it out, because it was the same section that was missing in the portal he’d created using the Messenger’s Guild spell: the magical loop that disappeared in the middle of the location section. It hadn’t been present in either of the portals in the Messenger’s Guild spell, and apparently it was present in only one of the portals created by whatever item the rockfin had used.

With that in mind, Serenity took another look at the spellform. The beginning of the mystery section was a loop a lot like the missing loop. It was probably the other half of the spell that made the loop work.

Why would the other half of a portal spell need to be linked to this half in more than one way? It must be doing something, but Serenity couldn’t know what without figuring out its outputs. Unlike the other half - and for that matter, the location circuit itself - the lines leading away from the partially-present loop didn’t seem to vibrate. Or perhaps they were simply too low power for him to easily notice?

Serenity took another good look at the output section. It was sort of like the outputs he’d seen a long time ago when he disassembled a communication spell. If that was the case, though, it would be primarily visual, and with an overlay coming in from the side…

Serenity spent the next two hours working out the changes to the “sort of similar” communication spell that would be needed to connect to the output of the extra component of the portal. He was almost done when someone stepped through the portal from the other side.

Serenity didn’t even realize someone was there until he spoke. “Serenity. That is your name, isn’t it?”

Serenity pulled his attention away from finishing up the spell and turned to look at the other man. He was covered from head to toe, including something that looked like a combination face mask and respirator, though Serenity didn’t see an oxygen supply. The rest of his clothing looked like it was desert camo, and the nametag on his chest said Miller. “Yes, I’m Serenity. I wasn’t expecting anyone else?”

The stranger seemed to relax. “You’re late for your checkin by an hour, I’m supposed to see if you’re dead and collect the data if it’s still possible.”

Serenity smiled at that. “Well, I’m not dead. You’re right about the data, though, it should be ready to be sent over.”

There was a USB stick in each of the computers. It was an old format, but useful because it was still common. Each of the programs was set to save data both locally and to the external storage, so all he had to do was stop the external recording, pull the stick out, and hand it to the soldier.

“I’ll be, hm. Probably about another hour. I need to finish chasing down this oddity. I think it might be important.” Serenity looked back at the portal. The more he thought about it, the more important it seemed. There was no reason for it not to be on both sides if it wasn’t something important.

Serenity reached out a hand to give the USB sticks to the soldier, but the soldier didn’t take them.

“You have wings.” The soldier’s voice sounded disbelieving.

Come to think of it, he’d been in human form when he came through the portal. When had he shifted to chimera form? Oh, of course; he must have shifted to his chimera form after the water monster. “There’s something in the stream. Not sure what it was, but it tried to grab me; I shifted to get away from it, didn’t think about the wings.”

Serenity looked directly at the soldier, still holding the USB sticks out. “Don’t you want these?” As he took another look, he realized that the soldier was young; maybe twenty or so? Serenity couldn’t be certain with the protective gear in the way. He was definitely younger than any of the scientists Serenity had met in the camp.

“Oh, yeah.” The soldier took the memory sticks from Serenity. “So, uh, can you show me?”

Serenity was puzzled for a moment before he realized what he was being asked. “You want to see me shapeshift?”

The soldier nodded vigorously.

Serenity couldn’t think of a reason not to; it wasn’t like he was hiding the ability. If he had been, he’d have already failed repeatedly. “Sure.”

Serenity checked to be certain he wasn’t holding anything he’d need after the shift; he wasn’t, so he went ahead and shifted back to human. It didn’t take long. “There you go.”

“How do you…?” The soldier didn’t answer the question.

“Path skill.” Serenity smiled, knowing that didn’t answer the question, but also knowing that he could say he had. “Shouldn’t you be heading back?”

The soldier - Miller? - didn’t reply, but he turned to the portal and stepped through.

Serenity took the opportunity to return to examining the portal.

Serenity tweaked the output spell one last time before connecting it to the portal. He was certain there was supposed to be more to whatever connected to the strange incomplete portion, but he didn’t know what it was; he could only guess.

For safety’s sake, he’d connected it to a simple visual display. If something went wrong, that would limit the damage to light, and he’d carefully designed the spell to disintegrate if it were overloaded. It’d taken longer than the hour estimate, but it was finally done.

The visual display had taken as long as everything else put together. This wasn’t the first time Serenity had grumbled about his lack of an Illusion Affinity, but it was the first time he’d ever stopped to think that maybe he should fix the lack. Yes, he could make Energy work, but it really wasn’t very efficient, and there were times when a display was so useful!

Or … maybe he should just get a tablet and use his Magitech Affinity. That would probably be a better use of his time. It wasn’t like he was trying to do giant displays. Even if he was, he could probably use a projection system or something.

Serenity chuckled at his distraction and got back to work. He hooked the last few pieces together and watched the output to see what he’d get. He was expecting something location-related; maybe it would just repeat the location of the portal on the other side? That seemed redundant when the portal’s location circuit already knew it.

Or maybe it was doing some sort of compensation for movement? This portal wasn’t on the same planet after all; the one Serenity created was able to work with a simple relative position, but that wouldn’t work for an interplanetary portal. The relative distances were always changing. If that was all it was, it wouldn’t be particularly helpful but at least it would make sense. The loop would warrant further investigation, since it would somehow be managing the relative motion of two planets that were moving in very different directions; it at least seemed to be an extremely simple magical component, far simpler than any circuit that could do the equivalent.

It was a continuous string of numbers. Yes, they were numbers in Bridge, but Serenity could easily translate that. The problem was that they were numbers without context.