“Dead. Croaked. Shuffled off. Do I have to do the whole parrot sketch? The important thing is that I came back stronger every time, so I’d advise against killing me.”
“That’s quite a claim,” Keith said. “I don’t suppose you have any way of substantiating it?”
“Mate, it’s death; you don’t get a receipt. I don’t think. Shade…?”
“No,” Shade said.
“Shade’s dad is in charge of the afterlife,” Jason said. “He refuses to tell me what happens to souls when they die, though. My personal recollection is hazy at best.”
“That is not for the living to know,” Shade said.
“What do you mean, in charge of the afterlife?” Anna asked.
“Are you familiar with great astral beings? They’re kind of like super gods. Your regular gods, that you’ll find on any world with enough magic, are on a scale of your Zeus, Odin, etcetera. Great astral beings operate on more of a cosmic scale. That’s your ‘knocking out a universe in seven days’ crowd. Shade’s progenitor is the Reaper, who takes charge of the dead. We haven’t met, but he seems like a stand-up guy. He may be a little cross with me because I keep dodging him, though.”
“These are some outrageous claims you’re making,” Anna said. “Even by our standards.”
“Which means you’re either telling us fibs,” Asya said, “or giving us insights into some of the most fundamental questions about reality.”
Jason flashed her a grin. “Stick with me and I’ll show you the cosmos.”
“I might just hold you to that,” Asya said.
“Do you have the means to travel between worlds?” Anna asked.
“No,” Jason said. “My journey was unexpected, in both directions. I am, however, going to find one.”
“How?”
“No idea.”
“You told one of my people that there was more than one other world,” Anna said.
“Yes, although I only visited the one. I don’t know much about the others. What’s relevant to our dealings here is what I brought back with me. I have a few material resources, but that’s a minor matter. More important is the knowledge.”
“What kind of knowledge?” Keith asked.
“Before I go into that,” Jason said, “I’d like to explore your side of things for a moment, now that we’ve discussed mine. Let me begin by going over what I’ve been able to surmise about your Network.”
“Please do,” Keith said. “I’m curious as to what an outsider has been able to piece together.”
“Well, I think the seeds of your organisation were planted somewhere in the vicinity of half a millennium ago, probably by one or more outworlders who roamed around founding secret societies. These secret societies were most likely predicated on the existence of essences, although that’s a guess. At that time, I imagine there were few, if any, opportunities to encounter monsters or other magical resources. Essences were probably hoarded and used by only a few, maybe even one person for each of the secret societies.”
“Did you get this information from Vermillion?” Anna asked.
“Some of it,” Jason said. “A lot of the blanks he didn’t know, I filled in myself. I’m guessing that when these secret societies were founded, they were each given access to something. Some means of detecting and interceding in certain magical events. Events that either began happening or started to significantly escalate in frequency, somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century.”
“That’s not inaccurate,” Keith said.
“The incidents in question are, I’m assuming, the formation of short-lived, proto-astral spaces. I’m not sure what you call them locally, but I’m talking about unstable dimensional pockets attached to the world. I’ve only encountered the stable variant myself, although I have studied the theory.”
“We call them dimensional incursions,” Anna said. “The primary purpose of the Network is to find the incursions, enter them, and prevent the entities there from making it into our world.”
“How does that work?”
“Each incursion contains a number of hostile entities,” Anna explained.
“Monsters,” Jason said.
“We use the term dimensional entity, or DE,” Anna said. “We send tactical teams to eliminate them. The secondary entities are inconsequential, but each incident has one or more of what we call an anchor dimensional entity, or ADE. If we take it or them out, then whatever is left disappears into the ether when the incursion space breaks down.”
“How long does that take?” Jason asked.
“Forty-three hours, as a baseline. Slightly longer with a more powerful ADE, but fifty-one is the record. That was with a category four ADE.”
“Gold rank?” Jason asked. “You have people strong enough to handle that?”
“There has only been one category-four incursion to date,” Anna said. “It took a small army of category-three tactical personnel plus a large amount of military firepower to handle it. We’ve been working on magically enhanced heavy ordnance ever since. We aren’t equipped to tackle an increase in incursions of that level, though.”
“When we fail to eliminate the ADE,” Nigel said, “any DEs still around when the incursion space breaks down are injected into our world.”
“We’ve prevented this in all but a few, isolated incidents,” Keith said. “Luckily, they were each in remote locations where there were minimal casualties, and we were able to cover. Mostly.”
“We use the incursion space to harvest magical materials,” Asya explained. “Those materials are critical to maintaining our ability to resist incursion events. Essences and awakening stones are the most valuable materials, as you might imagine.”
“Over the last century,” Anna said, “both the number and strength of the incursions have been escalating, just as you said. We’ve managed to keep up thus far, given that more powerful incursion spaces mean better harvests. We’re reaching the point where we don’t have the resources to raise our people beyond category three. There’s been talk of pooling resources to try and get a small number of our most exceptional people worldwide to category four, but negotiations aren’t going well.”
“Trouble choosing which branch gets the category fours?” Jason guessed.
“Yes,” Keith said. “The obvious solution is to place them directly under the command of the International Committee and dispatch them globally at need. Unfortunately, the more powerful branches in the US, China, and Russia are pushing back on that. Since they are the primary source of spirit coins, they can’t just be ignored.”
“You don’t have spirit coin farms,” Jason said. “That makes sense. Earth doesn’t have the magic and coin formation takes months, so you can’t do it in the proto-astral spaces. Are you getting your coins from loot powers?”
“Yes,” Keith said. “And the major powers make a point of trying to poach anyone who gets such a power to maintain their monopoly. They offer the kind of terms that are hard to turn down, although naturally, many do. None of the Australian branches currently have anyone with a looting power.”
The others all turned an unfriendly glare on Other Gordon.