Monroe

Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Four. Putting the Magic into Ritual Magic.

Bob flipped the page on his drawing pad with a sigh. He was only halfway through his second pad, and he was getting rather tired of mapping mana flows.

They'd been at it for four days. It turned out that to properly map the mana flows, you had to watch them for a few minutes.

Trebor had informed him that if he really wanted to map the mana flows, Thidwell's method was insufficient, and he would need to check the flows at various times of the day, several times a month, for a few years.

Acknowledging that this would require time that wasn't available, he'd conceded that Thidwell's method would work, less rather than more, but it wouldn't cause them to fail the task at hand.

Still, they probably only needed another day, perhaps a day and a half, and then they'd have a comprehensive map of the mana flowing through the valley.

As he brought up his persistent effect mana sight, he started to trace the mana flows. Six hundred and eighty-three days left.

Two days later, Bob stood in Thidwell's office with Bailli and Erick, watching as the huge man flipped through their notebooks, nodding and muttering to himself.

Thidwell closed his eyes, an expression of intense concentration on his face. One hundred seconds later, an opaque, three-dimensional map floated in the air, laying out the valley in detail, with tiny blue lines of mana running through it.

Thidwell reached down, touched a section of the map, then pulled his finger up, drawing a silvery line from the map. Once his finger reached a foot above the map, the line suddenly expanded, and the area Thidwell had touched was enlarged, allowing the smallest of details to be seen.

Thidwell looked down at the pads on his desk, opened one, and compared the map on the paper to the map in the air.

Nodding, he pointed at the pads on the table. "Start verifying," he growled, "with four of us, we should have the map ready by lunch."

Bob poked the illusionary map, pulling his finger up and displaying a section. He reached for a pad and started leafing through it to find the right section.

Thidwell was eerily accurate, as they'd finished verifying that the illusionary map was accurate just as Erick's stomach let out an audible growl.

"Why don't you two," he nodded to Bailli and Erick, "head on down and sort out lunch, then bring it back up," he gestured towards Bob, "I need to talk to him privately for a few minutes."

Bailli and Erick gave Bob a look of sympathy as they headed out the door.

Once it had closed, Thidwell turned to face Bob. "How much have you told them about your plan to bring your people here?"

"Bailli knows, and I presume Erick does as well," Bob replied.

"Are they aware of the scope?" Thidwell asked.

"I told Bailli how many people are on Earth," Bob shrugged, "but those kind of numbers are hard to understand; I mean, you know intellectually what the number means, but finding a frame of reference for it is harder, after all, how many flakes of snow are in a snowstorm?"

Thidwell nodded grimly and gestured to the map. "One of the reasons we've mapped everything out is so that we can accommodate the structures that will need to be built to house and store people."

Thidwell cast a spell, and a tiny replica of the Adventurers Guild in Holmstead appeared on the map. He cast another spell, and the mana flows on the map adjusted, subtly in some places, dramatically in others.

"You'll be effectively building a city," Thidwell rumbled, "so we need to also consider how that will impact the mana flows before we start building the first Dungeon."

Bob nodded slowly.

"Can you show what the valley will look like once we have all forty of the Dungeons built and driven down to the eleventh floor?" Bob asked.

"I can," Thidwell acknowledged, "but understand that with each floor you add, the accuracy of the model decreases slightly."

The Adventurers Guild disappeared from the map as Thidwell cast another spell, causing forty mausoleums to appear, in a relatively neat grid, eight by five.

Bob watched the mana flow through the model of the valley. Some of the flows had changed their course, running directly towards a Dungeon, while others had shifted to join together, forming thicker flows. Ultimately, all the mana flows now ran to a Dungeon.

Bob nodded. He could see why the Dungeons weren't perfectly spaced apart. The mana flows wouldn't have been equal.

"Ok," he mumbled as he walked around the model.

"Can you show me a stone tower on top of each Dungeon, two hundred feet on each side at the base, and a thousand feet high?" Bob asked

Thidwell shook his head, "A stiff wind would blow it over," he replied doubtfully.

"Not if we integrate the buildings footings as part of the Dungeon," Bob replied, "or vice versa, depending on your outlook."

Bob grabbed one of the drawing pads and flipped the first page over, and started sketching on the back of a map.

"Look, you just need to drive it deeply enough, and anchor it to a solid mass," Bob explained, "back on Earth, we embed thick metal wire, woven into a cable, as well as metal beams, rods, and mesh, into the material we use to create the stone walls, pillars, and floors."

"I'm not an expert on the construction methods, but I can go to Earth and retrieve it," Bob said, "Hell, I can likely retrieve an architect or a civil engineer who can test the local materials and provide an ideal design."

Thidwell grimaced as he looked at the model, his brows furrowed. "That would be quite a lot of space," he rumbled thoughtfully.

"If we set it up as dormitory-style housing, with a shower/laundry/kitchenette added, it would probably end up at a hundred units per floor," Bob said, "figure ninety floors, assuming a series of skeletal floors to allow wind to pass through, and a series of floors for random stuff, shops, and services, so call it seventy floors for actual housing, or seven thousand units per tower."

"It could work, assuming you can find the necessary knowledge to keep a structure that tall upright," he cast a spell, and the mausoleums were replaced with towers. The mana flows twisted and shifted before settling back down.

"I'm not entirely confident in my model at this point," Thidwell grumbled, "when I cast the ritual, the intent was to mirror the mana flows, as observed and laid out in the drawings."

Letting out a sigh, he gestured towards the model, "Structures that large and that tall might very well have an impact on the manner in which the ambient mana is drawn to the ground."

"Taking it as a given that my recruitment efforts are going to be slow, at least initially," Bob began, "why not build a single Dungeon, complete with the tower above it, in one of the corner areas," he continued, "we can map the effect on the mana flows, and extrapolate that to the remaining towers as they are constructed."

"We wouldn't have to worry about housing and services for the first two hundred and eighty thousand people this way," Bob enthused, "and as an added bonus, if we don't have any windows on the first ten floors, we can focus our efforts on the Dungeons below during a wave."

"Two hundred and eighty thousand people," Thidwell laughed, "I can't even imagine that many people in one place."

Bob hesitated for a moment, then steeled himself. "All of that is without spatial expansion," he thought for a moment, "assuming we can increase the size of an apartment by a factor of five, which I'm given to understand is well within the capabilities of a tier five dimensionalist, and further assuming they are also a transmuter who can reduce the weight expressed by the dimensional space by eighty percent, it's not at all outside the realm of possibility to have four thousand people living on the first ten or twelve floors, with the remaining floors setup as dimensional storage for keeping people in stasis."

"The cost of upkeep with that degree of spatial expansion and weight reduction, over that many rooms, would be ruinous," Thidwell grumbled, "believe me, I quadrupled the number of rooms at the Guild," the huge man shook his head slowly, "I have three hundred and twenty rooms now, and while they are currently in use, and likely to be so in the near future, if we ever reach the point where we are at less than twenty percent capacity, we'll start hemorrhaging mana crystals like a fountain."

"I don't think I'll need any spatial expansion on the upper floors," Bob replied, "each floor is sixty-two thousand five hundred square feet. Allow ten thousand for structural requirements and utilities, and another twenty thousand for hallways, then take the remainder, apply a ten-foot ceiling, and as you said, start stacking people up like cordwood."

Bob shook his head, "assuming eight feet in length, four feet across and four feet high, and each piece of cordwood is one hundred and twenty-eight cubic feet. Assuming thirty thousand square feet of usable 'stacking' space with a ten-foot ceiling, and we have three hundred thousand cubic feet, or two thousand, three hundred and forty..." Bob shook his head as the long-dormant gears of mental mathematics shuddered to life and began to spin, "three, people in stasis, per floor, without spatial expansion, although we might need to consider the weight as a separate issue."

"At any rate, let's be cautious and say sixty floors are dedicated to cold storage, so you'll end up with over a hundred and forty thousand people in stasis, per building, or just over five million in total," Bob shook his head, "with spatial expansion, the numbers become much larger, and we could see over twenty-five million people in stasis here, with a hundred and forty thousand people actively delving the Dungeons."

Bailli and Erick came back into the room, Bailli balancing a tray easily on her shoulder while Erick struggled with his own.

"Have you finished your secret mee...." Bailli trailed off as she looked at the model, with the forty towers clawing into the sky.

Erick nearly dropped his tray as he scrambled to set it down and inspect the model more closely.

With considerably more grace, Bailli set her tray down as well before moving over to look over the model as well.

"Are you somehow building a Dungeon up instead of down?" Erick asked.

"No," Bob replied, "that's meant to represent a building built above the Dungeon, to house the people from my world during the tide."

"Bailli mentioned something about that," Erick mumbled as he scrutinized the towers, "your universe doesn't have active mana, and when it activates, it'll cause a huge tide, and everyone on your world is level zero," he shook his head and looked up at Bob. "How many people are on your world?"

"A bit more than seven billion," Bob answered.

"And how many people will these huge towers hold?" Bailli asked.

"Assuming we use most of the space to stack them up like cordwood," Bob glanced at Thidwell, "and have them in stasis, and the spaces are spatially expanded, a little over twenty-five million."

"And a billion is a thousand million, right?" Bailli queried.

"Yep," Bob replied.

"So even though twenty-five million is a lot, it's not that much overall," Bailli said.

"Not even one percent," Bob said sadly, "my country alone has three hundred and thirty million people in it, give or take."

Both Erick and Bailli shook their heads while Thidwell frowned.

"Luckily, I have six hundred and eighty-one days to find a solution for everyone else, and hopefully, I'll have a Dungeon, and a tower sorted out soon enough, and I'll start bringing over people who are better equipped to deal with this," Bob finished.

Thidwell had agreed to help build a small test Dungeon on the corner of the valley closest to the glacier, which was diagonal to the corner where they were going to build the Dungeon/Tower.

Bob needed a Dungeon to run people through when he started recruiting. He'd managed to convince Thidwell that they should slap a two-story dormitory over the top of the Dungeon so that they'd at least have some form of housing. Eventually, the Dungeon would be rebuilt anyway.

So Bob found himself laying out a ridiculous amount of copper wire in an intricate pattern, spread over ten thousand square feet. The edges of the pattern were a square, measuring one hundred feet on each side.

Of course, the sides weren't perfectly straight, as the mana flows dictated a nudge inward here, a smidge outward there. A circle of wire touched all four sides of the square, while a helix of wire connected the corners of the square to the sides of the circle, the end of each helix flaring out in a graceful arc to marry the side of the circle.

And none of these were perfect because they all had to be adjusted slightly.

Inside the circle, every few feet, a wire led off to spiral into the center, where Bob sat, in a very small, rough circle of braided copper wire, cable thick.

Thidwell, Erick, and Bailli had watched patiently as Bob had laid the copper wiring in place, which had taken him the remainder of yesterday afternoon and nine hours today to accomplish.

Bob closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. Monroe was tucked away in his inventory, sleeping.

This ritual was going to shape the mana conduits above the Dungeon and the first floor. And thanks to some help from Trebor, the foundation of the building.

Bob pulled a pouch filled with mana crystals out of his inventory and poured two thousand mana crystals into his lap. He stored the pouch away and thrust his hands into the pile of mana crystals. He focused on the pattern of the ritual arrayed all around him, intent on the effect he was determined to invoke, and then he stretched his matrix from his hands and into the mana crystals and pulled.

He felt the mana flowing out of the crystals and through his body, a not unfamiliar sensation.

Then the array activated, and he felt a massive draw on his matrix.

Bob gasped and then clenched his teeth as a torrent of mana raged from the mana crystals that were rapidly dissipating, through his matrix, and into the rapidly energizing array around him. He focused his mind on the design of the mana flows and the solid granite design of the Dungeon.

Seconds passed, and he ignored the burning sensation that traced his veins, focusing only on the desired result.

He didn't notice when the ground beneath him shimmered and twisted as reality was remade by his will.

Nor did he realize that a stairway had opened near the edge of the southern wall, leading down but leaving the array suspended in space above it as the ritual raced towards completion.

Bob's concentration on the purpose of the ritual didn't falter until the last mana crystal dissipated, and the flow of mana rushing through his matrix ended.

He leaned forward with a groan as his muscles tried to decide if they were going to cramp or not. Two thousand seconds was a long time to channel mana through your matrix. Opening his eyes, he was pleased to see that the entire area had been turned into a smooth granite slab with a delicate inlay of charred copper.

Bob looked at the copper cable that had encircled him and was shocked to see that it had fused together and sunk into the granite, leaving only the top flush with the stone.

Standing up, he swayed in place for a moment, then found his balance and walked over to the others.

Bailli and Erick were whispering excitedly to each other as they both referenced a copy of the design he'd laid out while Thidwell looked at him impassively.

As he approached, Thidwell's face broke out into one of his malicious smiles, and he nodded to Bob, "Well cast," he rumbled as he gestured to the granite slab, "it normally takes people quite a few attempts before they are able to maintain their concentration on their intent for the duration of the ritual, but it appears that you remained steadfast."

Thidwell pointed towards the stairs leading down, drawing Bob's attention to them.

"Let's go finish it," he rumbled, "you handled the twin ritual above," his grin widened as he unknowingly echoed Trebors suggestion, "maybe you can perform the next as a triple."