"Bob!" Alex exclaimed cheerfully as he rushed forward to embrace Bob in a hug.

"Alex," Bob replied awkwardly, patting the man on the back for a moment before he pulled out of the hug.

"It's great to see you!" Alex began, "Also, wow, you're looking snazzy! You didn't get those clothes from the dinosaur people, did you? I mean, they didn't look that dexterous in the photos you sent me, but there might be other types, right? Can't judge a book by its cover and all that. You brought your armbands, right?" Alex peered at Bob's arm, giving it an exploratory poke.

"I did," Bob agreed, uncuffing his sleeve and rolling it up in order to remove the device. He attempted to hand it to Alex, but it was intercepted by one of the men who had preceded Alex, whose nametag read 'H. Jackson.'

"Apologies, sir," Jackson said, "Alex isn't allowed to bring anything into the facility."

"It was one time," Alex huffed.

"It took three days to root out that piece of software," Jackson replied dryly, "three days during which all voice communications were altered so that the two parties sounded like Bert and Ernie."

"It was a pretty good one," Alex agreed happily. "Kristi outdid herself."

"She's lucky she didn't end up in jail," Jackson muttered.

"Man, there's gonna be so much data to dig through," Alex rubbed his hands together before looking around. "Hey, can you do us up a table and chairs so I don't have to ask these guys to find some?"

Bob looked at Jackson, who let out a sigh and nodded.

He let his mana flow, filling the patterns for five persistent effect Summon Mana-infused Object spells. The mana coalesced like an afterimage in a dark blue-black that immediately faded to reveal four chairs and a table.

"Dude, how high is your spellcasting score?" Alex asked as he poked his chair for a moment before settling into it. "You just cast five spells at once," he shook his head. "That's nuts, you know that, right? I'm pretty damn good, and without using barrage or chain, I can do three." He frowned. "Actually, I should be able to do four based on my spellcasting score. That's weird." He held out his hand, outlining Bob and the two guards in orange light, before leaning forward and massaging his temples. "Nope, can't do four," he reported.

"Maybe it's a tier eight thing?" Bob offered.

"Maybe," Alex conceded. "Although, shouldn't you be tier nine already? I mean, you're still tier eight, right? Did you level at all when you were gone? It's been like, two years!"

"No, although we are thinking about making the push," Bob replied. "I guess the Queen is closing in on tier nine."

"She totally is," Alex agreed. "And you totally should!" He lowered his voice and looked from to side to side at his two guards. "I know some people are a little snippy about it, but I think the choices you made were awesome. You made people better, which is really hard to do."

Bob winced. "I'm still not sure I had the right to do that," he admitted. "I don't think I'm the best person to make those sorts of decisions for our entire species, but I did the best I could," he took a deep breath. "Also, it's not like people can't just transition to another species."

"Yeah, there's some of that going on," Alex shook his head. "Not as much as you might think, though. It turns out that a lot of people have a sort of instinctive response where they freak the fuck out when a dragon dude or godzilla girl walks into Starbucks, you know? Also, most of us like where humanity is going. More curiosity, more empathy, more kindness? Deep down, I think that all of us want to think we're good people, right? Plus, you're super famous. They're making a movie about you!"

Bob blinked. He'd been formulating a question for when Alex paused to take a breath, which was the only tactic you could really employ when talking to him, but that last bit had totally derailed his train of thought.

"Wait, what?" Bob asked.

"Yeah! It's just rumors and stuff right now, but they're everywhere! Henry Carvill wouldn't give a yes or no answer when they asked him if it was true he had been tapped to play you," Alex replied. "I don't know if that's true, though, I mean, he's tier seven, and he's been a huge part of building the Spear of Eternity, which is that massive ship that all the forty-k guys have been spending their time and crystals on, so how would he have the time?"

Bob shook his head. "I lived my life, and I can promise you, it wasn't that interesting. Not until I ended up on Thayland, and even then, it was really just a lot of grinding."

"Maybe it's nothing? Heck, there was a rumor that you were going to pimp Monroe out in order to create a species of perfect kitties," Alex grinned.

"I am not pimping out my cat!" Bob objected.

"You should probably tell a reporter that the next time you talk to one," Alex suggested helpfully. "Anyway, you should definitely snag the first person to tier nine thingy. Also, you'll need to go to an FCC outlet to get new armbands," he smiled apologetically. "I hit a wall with the hardware maybe six months ago, and they've been approved for civilian use, although I can give you a software upgrade to restore them to full functionality."

Jackson coughed deliberately.

"I mean, you'll have to use the civilian models, as I couldn't possibly upgrade them with more functional firmware if the Freedom were to appear directly above this building at, oh, say, noon on Friday by means of a direct microwave link, the hardware and software for which I installed on the Freedom the last time you were here."

Jackson sighed.

"Are they better than the ones we had?" Bob asked.

"Oh yeah, loads," Alex nodded. "I hit my head against that quantum entanglement wall until the squishy sound stopped, but that wasn't the only avenue of improvement available. Moore's law may have been broken for a while, but it kicked back in hard when the System came online. We're talking orders of magnitude." He grinned. "They're well worth the price."

"How much are they?" Bob asked.

"Five thousand each," Alex replied. "But they operate off reserve mana now, or at least they have the option to, so long term you might recoup some of that." He paused for a moment, his expression thoughtful. "Well, someone will, eventually. They're damn near indestructible, and assuming you pass them down to someone when you buy a newer, fancier model, someday they will have paid for themselves."

"That's not a small number of crystals," Bob said with a frown. "Isn't the whole world still basically scrambling for delves and thus, crystals?"

It was Alex's turn to frown as he made a see-saw motion with his hand. "Yes, but also no? How much have you caught up on since you've been back?"

Bob shrugged. "Not much," he admitted. "We got back and went out to dinner."

Alex shook his head. "Things have changed a lot since you've been gone," he began. "A girl in Eygpt figured out how to offload the limit for persistent effects onto other people and published a paper on it. I think that was maybe two months after you left? Anyway, the upshot was that a lot of the things we were relying on mana crystals to accomplish, we could suddenly get by with persistent effects, kind of." He grinned. "Maybe the most important thing was that we could use a persistent effect plant growth effect, and while it's not like a ritual, it does let us harvest a field every week or two, depending on the level of the caster. That was huge, although in a way, it did sort of cause more problems."

"How so?" Bob asked as Alex paused to take a breath.

"Well, the big problem has been travel, right?" Alex frowned. "Wait, you don't know about that, do you?"

"I know that the government has been begging for dimensionalists," Bob replied.

"Yeah, no, not for this," Alex took a deep breath, and Bob braced himself.

"Alright, so it turns out that active mana has a sort of knock-on effect on, like, everything. Plants grow faster, animals reproduce more quickly, organic matter decomposes more quickly, the works. The more active mana, the stronger the effect is, right? Well, it turns out that the more people you have in an area cycling mana, which we figured is what activates it, in turn confirming what you and the others from Thayland had said, the more active mana you have. Even after the King of Greenwold opened up Thayland for Dungeon Visas, we still had eight million people in the greater Los Angeles area, all of whom were cycling through a little mana, which became more and more mana as they slowly leveled. The effects of active mana started to become really obvious. Streets were falling into disrepair in a matter of weeks, vines and trees were growing up through people's homes, school playgrounds became forests over the summer break."

"Oh," Bob frowned.

That was something he'd forgotten about.

The entire purpose of Dungeons was or had been, at least on Thayland, to keep mana from coalescing into monsters. A side effect of keeping a Dungeon constantly drawing mana was that it reduced the impact of active mana in the area that it pulled mana from. He knew that active mana, or mana that had been used by a person was different from ambient mana and had an impact in the area that ambient mana didn't. It just hadn't ever been an issue, as most of the ritual enchantments that people used were powered in part by active mana.

Earth didn't have centuries, decades, or even years of enchantments layered on the populations' buildings, tools, and clothing.

"Yeah," Alex agreed. "Luckily, keeping plants from growing is another aspect of the plant growth spell, so once we figured out what was going on, the government started a program to have people donate a portion of their mana to keep things under control."

"That's what you were looking at in the parking lot," Herrara added, having come around the counter to listen to the conversation.

"Yeah, we have that here," Alex agreed. "It works really well. Turns out that if everyone donates one mana in a city of eight million, you have eight million mana to play with. It's not that simple, of course, but it actually worked out pretty well, at least in terms of keeping our infrastructure from crumbling. Sadly, when you look at the demographics of smaller, agricultural communities, it turns out they don't have enough people to keep everything together, let alone to keep the roads going from town to town clear."

Bob nodded. Thayland didn't have roads leading between its towns and cities for much the same reason. It was cheaper to open a portal or a gateway than it was to keep a road clear, not to mention a hell of a lot quicker.

"All of that is a huge problem, but it's really people that are causing most of the trouble," Alex continued. "You remember before you left that people didn't want to leave the city? Well, it got worse once they realized that food could be grown and electricity generated without mana crystals. Sure, you need to be level ten and focused on caster attributes to live comfortably, but once people figured it out, they settled in. That has created a huge discrepancy in regard to levels. The average level in Los Angeles is fourteen." Alex took a breath and shook his head. "And that's super skewed by those of us who are required by the government to level up as part of our contracts. If you took us out of the equation, it's more like eight. The average level in the state of Nebraska is twenty-eight. The people outside of the major cities aren't happy. There are some small towns where everyone over the age of eighteen has to delve for six hours a day, every day, in order to keep the Dungeon from overflowing. Yes, they're gaining levels and keeping their skills capped, but they're also paying a disproportionally large share of the taxes per person, and the crystals they are paying aren't being spent on those communities. Those people are pissed, Bob. There is a bill in the house right now to restrict the number of crystals that can be shipped out of the state, and it looks like it might just pass. If it does, it'll sail through the senate, and the President will have a hard choice in front of her."

"That's not great, I guess? I mean, honestly, that's going to be a self-correcting error," Bob said. "Eventually, people will either become powerful enough to do more with less, or the quality of life will drive people to move to an area with more opportunities."

Alex snorted. "Yeah, but in the meantime, we've got people being people, you know? There were something like seventeen thousand murders in the United States in two thousand nineteen. Last year and the numbers are not solid, with underreporting being a real problem, there were six hundred and four thousand. It turns out that not everyone should have access to magic powers, but even though that number is huge, we're still talking about less than a quarter of a tenth of a percent of the population, so it's hard to look at the demographics of the perpetrators and say 'oh, men fifteen to twenty-five are most likely to commit murder, so let's not let them level up,' because statistically, it doesn't matter. Which doesn't address the issue that murder is apparently a lot easier with magic powers because there were another two hundred thousand disappearances last year, some of which might have been murders."

"It's crazy how many people turn into monsters when they get their hands on a little bit of power," Alex concluded.

"Our core is madness," Bob murmured. "The Prime Directive is murder."

"What?" Alex asked.

"Stephen King," Bob replied. "I wonder if he's still writing?"

"Probably," Alex shrugged. "Most of the famous people reincarnated. Man, you haven't seen Angelina Jolie yet, have you? Dude, I'm not one to drool over celebrities, but she reincarnated, and she's tier seven now." He mimed fanning himself. "Wow. Tiers and levels make everyone look better, but it's sort of based on where you started, you know?"

"Never really cared that much," Bob replied with a shrug. "What else is going in the world besides our interstate system collapsing, the flyover states suddenly mattering, and people being people?"

"Well, your buddy Yorrick is doing a hell of a job turning the Kalahari desert into a temperate forest," Alex replied.