City of Opportunities 7 – Into the Portal

“Now I feel like a massive moron,” Avari groaned.

“I’ll repay you,” Eldred immediately promised, upper body bent in a deep bow.

They were in the middle of a mall, one serving the needs of the locals. There were many terms for the frontliners of the corporations. Adventurer, explorer, vanguardist and harvester were all in common usage. The term Eldred preferred was extractor. Whatever name one put to it, the purpose was simple: enter a portal, find or prospect resources, bring back intel or goods, make money.

The portal they were heading into was the heart of the Low-Ore district. As the portal was quite small and the ores that could be found behind it common, none of the larger corporations had taken an interest in all of it. Still, a steady supply of metals was enough to vitalize this mall, with its variety of shops offering mining equipment, weapons, armour, and appropriate clothes, among other things.

Things that the trio needed to maximise their chances for a good haul. Things that Eldred, obviously, had no money to buy.

Avari clicked her tongue, counting the money in her purse one more time before throwing it into a locker alongside the rest of her private belongings. Taking a purse along into a mining expedition was just asking to lose it. “You better!” She slammed the locker shut. The metal bars inside turned in response to her fingerprint. “If you turn out to be the big failure of a man you first looked to be, then I will still get my money out of you one way or another!”

Eldred kept his head lowered. That aggressive assertiveness he had come to embody in the last 48-hours was not stirred by her comments this time. There was quite a difference, after all, between being blown off before even making an offer and having expectations placed on him by his de facto sponsor.

“Look up already,” Avari groaned. “Enough of the supplication – time is money and all that.”

“Right.” Eldred straightened up, only for his male gaze to check Avari out. The gremlin was out of her dull, grey suit and had changed into a mesh of polyester and alchemical threads, shaped into a bodysuit. It did stick to her voluptuous curves wonderfully, fusing protection with sexiness. The form-fitting, reinforced cups around her breasts were absolutely awe-inspiring, as was the mild shine of the fabric that stretched over her plump ass.

[Avari Bodysuit AI: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/08ce114e1d07.png ]

Avari whistled loudly. “You don’t get check-out privileges until I come out of there richer than I went into it!” Despite her words, she didn’t seem to mind him ogling too much. That went for him and the other men that passed by the public locker area. It was quite difficult not to stare at a shiny-wrapped bundle of tits and ass, especially while she was strapping weapons to herself.

“Reasonable,” Eldred agreed all the same, then checked the straps on his sides. She had not splurged on an expensive bodysuit for him and he did not blame her for that whatsoever. Instead, he was protected by simple sheets of carbon-wrapped steel, strapped to his chest, back, forearms and shins. It wasn’t much, but it offered an impressive degree of protection for the price. More important was the dagger that rested in a sheathe on his right thigh.

Eldred would have preferred a sword, but Avari had insisted he stick to a dagger. It was cheaper, she had said, easier to transport and also easier to use for the untrained.

Avari herself had two similar daggers on her thighs and a quiver with crossbow bolts on her back. The weapon itself was attached to the large backpack that Eldred was lugging about. In it were the various instruments they were likely to need.

Everything that Eldred was carrying, ignoring the crossbow and the clothes under the armour, were things Avari had bought. The bodysuit, daggers, crossbow, quiver and bolts were all things she had already possessed. How and why were questions he kept to himself.

“You’re getting better at not sticking your nose into things,” Avari commented, noticing his curiosity.

“I’m tactless, not an idiot,” Eldred responded in a jokingly dry tone. “I’ll ask when I have earned it.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

They left the locker area of the mall and stepped out into the street. The Low-Ore district was alive. Unlike Ever-Rain and Rust-Grass, this district was part of the wider Iridescia economy. Cars drove around, picking up and delivering goods. People marched around, for business and pleasure, sitting in cafés to discuss the next dive into the portal. The only unusual factor was the lack of children around. This was a working district. Few people lived here and those few would not raise a family in those apartments.

The buildings around them went as high as four stories tall. They were from a scattershot of architectural styles, each one less appealing than the last. It wasn’t that they were necessarily ugly, just that glass, steel and concrete made for an uninspiring neighbourhood.

“You can come out, you know?” Eldred spoke into the air. “I doubt the people here would mind.”

“They definitely wouldn’t,” Avari agreed. “People fear an unbound, unpredictable banshee, her voice fuelled by the leylines, not some guy’s familiar.”

“Be that as it may…” The ghost lady broke her silence while remaining invisible. “…I am content being outside the crowd. It is too noisy for my liking.”

“Fair enough,” Avari responded.

Their steps carried them down the paved road and up to a cylindrical building at the heart of the district. It was the headquarters of the New Foundations Company and the building that contained the portal. Owning a portal was a privilege jealously guarded. As long as it existed, it provided constant access to the resources of another world and when it collapsed, it provided the most valuable resource of all: Echo.

From what they had learned while shopping, the New Foundations Company made very little money out of entering the portal themselves. Their main income source was, instead, the mall that they had just left. A safer way to get money out of the portal while staying relevant enough to monopolize it.

They stepped into the large foyer. Without hesitation, they marched up to the front desk, where a single, bored employee was tapping away on his smartphone. The moment they were in his field of view, he put the device aside and looked up at them. “Welcome to the New Foundations Company headquarters, how may I be of assistance?”

“We have taken a mission to enter the portal,” Eldred responded. “Names are Eldred, Nyx and Avari.”

The worker put the names into the work computed in front of him. “Right… so where is your third?” he asked, then raised an eyebrow when Nyx manifested.

‘It occurs to me what a different world I am entering,’ Eldred thought. At his most successful, previously, he had been part of the service economy for the general population. Before yesterday, he had only ever heard of ghosts in news stories. Even the average worker of a corporation only regarded the appearance of a banshee with the mildest of surprise.

“Technically speaking,” he drawled the words. “I can’t let you go in. Bonded spirits and familiars are not counted as a separate person for the purpose of our Trust and Safety policies.”

“Practically speaking?” Eldred asked, hearing the implications.

“Practically speaking, I think it’s unnecessary precautions and I don’t care.” The worker shrugged callously. “Three or two, not my problem if you get yourself killed in there.”

“What a great display of empathy,” Avari joked. “You’re just an example of kindness, aren’t you?”

“I can just deny you and then you can make different plans for your evening,” the worker responded.

“No, that will be fine,” Eldred responded swiftly. “Just point us in the right direction and we will be out of your hair.”

“Sure thing – come along.” The worker stood up and gestured for them to follow him through a door to the right of the reception desk.

Following a short, grey-carpeted corridor, they entered a large display room that smelled a bit too much of dust and minerals to be natural. An impression only further justified by the fact that every chunk of ore and crystal in the room was covered by a glass case.

“You are about to enter Chunk of Attarius 14,” the worker droned off a script so deeply ingrained, even his own additions had become a part of it. “It was a big rock in the Universal Sea, populated by dwarves and stone elementals, until the latter held a massive ritual to destroy the former and summoned the god Ragthar, who then shattered the entire planet, killing both sides. Very ironic.”

“Very,” Avari agreed.

“And now Attarius is an unstable bunch of smaller rocks hurling through the Universal Sea. Because it's still resonating with summoning magic, portals to it open pretty frequently here in the interstice. The portal we have here has been open for over 120 years and shows no signs of destabilisation. Because we have had it for so long and because there have been portals to other chunks, it's pretty well known what’s there to find – and of course the major sites have already been picked clean.”

The worker put his hand on top of one display case, then had his hand ‘leap’ to the next as he talked. For each of the items he listed, he repeated this little spiel.

“Copper, iron, tin, silver, gold, platinum – that’s the usual stuff you can still find there. If you’re unlucky, it's raw ore, if you’re lucky, you are finding clumps of dwarven decorations and jewellery that got melted when the planet exploded. Very pure, very easy to transport. All the same, none of those metals are in high demand, but they still sell.”

The worker tapped on a small display attached to every glass case, a live ticker showing how much the metal was worth at any given second. The numbers looked impressive to Eldred, though he had to admit to himself that he had very little concept of what was actually impressive to the corporations of Iridescia.

What he did know was that the last display of the row had a value number a hundred times higher than platinum. The metal inside was a shimmering red, partly covered in patches of black. A solid chunk of lava, that was the feeling Eldred got from it. He could sense the warmth through the glass.

“Attarium,” the worker said, stopping with a hand on the glass. “Chunks of Ragthar’s molten sword that mixed with the metals of the planet where it pushed on through. If you find any of it, highly unlikely as that is, you’re getting a pretty penny for it. The craftsmen and ritualists love the stuff.” The worker tapped the case a second time, then continued the walk. “Everything you find will be sold to us. Attempts to smuggle anything out, to keep or to sell to someone else, will get you blacklisted by us and our associates. Understood?”

“Understood,” Eldred stated. The constriction bothered him on an instinctual level, but he had no right to demand to be free of it or its ilk. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

“Splendid.” The worker guided them through another door, then another corridor, and then finally pushed open a thick slab of steel that served as the final barrier.

The portal chamber was almost circular, the floor flattened only because people needed to walk across it. Floor, walls and ceiling alike were all out of welded layers of stainless steel. When one enveloped a portal to another world, one could never be too cautious about securing it from forces from the outside and the inside.

The portal itself was an oval-shaped thing. It was the first time Eldred properly saw one outside of school textbooks. As he had been taught, the connection point between the city of the interstice and this random world was eternally surrounded by prismatic flames. It was a visual phenomenon, a manifestation of the fraying, distorted space. Even weirder was that, no matter where he stood in the room, the view he had into the Chunk of Attarius 14 was the same.

The world on the other side was lit by lumens, standing across a vast cavern. Cables covered the stone floor and a variety of crates were scattered about. In the 120 years that the portal had been open, a small base camp had been established and then, from the looks of it, forsaken. The need to organise large groups must have faded when all the obvious veins had been picked clean.

“Well, that’s where the tour ends. Come by the front desk when you’re done,” the worker stated and walked away.

Eldred circled around the portal once. It was about three metres at the broadest point of its elliptic shape. It was certainly a lot smaller than the sky portal of Ever-Rain. It was even small in the grand scheme of things, as he understood.

“So, this is a portal,” Nyx muttered.

“Knocking loose any memories?” Avari asked. She had been informed of what broadly had gone on with both Eldred and Nyx on the way to the district. Not much else to do on a train ride.

“No,” his banshee responded.

“Figured. Ah well… let’s go? None of us are getting any younger and if this goes tits up, I want to be back in a time where I can still talk my way out of losing my job.”

“And I would like to buy clothes that look decent.” Seeing no reason to dally, Eldred led the way towards the portal. Without hesitation, he raised his foot over the dimensional threshold and stepped through to the other side.