Chapter 6

I spent only three more days in the hospital and that ring did wonders for me. I allowed that the hospital could call me and request that I lend it to them, but they were really fuzzy on whether they could ensure it was secure. I was loath to sell it though (since it had been such a lifesaver).

The hazards weren’t limited to inside the portals anymore.

I had lots of visitors, we talked and cried for our lost colleagues and patients. Flower-loving Cathy was gone.

I also had lots more flowers. They made me smile in a melancholy way. I was missing the closeness of a partner and the only person I’d even slightly been attracted to was in love with portal diving instead.

You begin to question yourself ‘Did I do the right thing? Am I asking too much of a partner? Am I asking too much of life?’.

Oddly, May was now one of my closest confidants.

“Leslie, you deserve happiness. You aren’t asking too much, it’ll just take some time.” I couldn’t bring myself to ask what this was doing to her. My house was spotless, our pet fish had died while I was ‘gone’, she held a funeral for it. The laundry was folded, and I got a note from the school mentioning a real positive change in Seneca’s behavior. She had managed the impossible for a week and a half, but I didn’t even think I could do this alone.

“How do you eat an Elephant mom?” asked my boy. He’d heard a joke at school (one clean enough that he could tell me at least) “One bite at a time!” He giggled and I smiled.

It became my mantra for the next month.

Walking was hard, but I went from two sticks, to one, to none over four weeks. I had sandals and socks on to begin with (in order to ensure I had enough room for the ring on my foot) but graduated to sneakers with a mesh top pretty quickly after the weather started getting cooler.

I contacted Uncle Norman and asked if any of his portals were free in the upcoming weeks. “Sorry sweetie, Bruce has them fully booked for the foreseeable future, he was even upset that I’d let you and your friends in the other week even though it only delayed them a day. He’s ... changed.” He paused for a breath.

“I’ve been trying to talk to him about these things, but he is really consumed. He’ll be at the gym every day, and this is after working the farm with me for 10 hours. I know college didn’t work out, and the farm wasn’t his first choice, but he doesn’t even have a life outside of the portal. It’s like an addiction.” he sounded defeated. “You seem to have a healthier view of these things. Could you speak to him?”

I agreed that I could and called his phone after hanging up with his father. I left a message after listening to an odd greeting about having contacted ‘Bruce and Bill’ asking him to call me to talk portals and portal diving. I repeated the call, and the message numerous times over the next few weeks.

I never did get to speak to him again.

Following Bruce’s death, Norman detached himself from the portals, signing on with one of a few new startups that were like the Air-B&B of Portals, looking after bookings, security, and marketing. I lost my easy access, and to be honest I also lost both him and Aunt Diane as they both retreated from anything to do with portals, myself included.

I caught a trip with Jimmy Jones who had been my mechanic’s employee for years. It was actually his (ex?)girlfriend who was part of the group who made the call. Their group had fractured due to their Leader playing favorites with a pretty (but apparently useless) young Weapon that he was playing around with. It was yet another purple portal, and I saw what Gregory had meant when he told me that the School scenario was easier.

We followed a careful plan of attack, barricading ourselves in various rooms, and fighting off smaller mobs of the zombies. I was mostly tasked with holding back the mob if it got too close and things started to go awry. I managed pretty well, surprising them with the speed that I could hurl a stone. What really got me an invite back for their last run was showing them a coffee cup that had silver in it (not unlike the take-out containers in the Factory). During the second round I managed to sniper one of the two Ghouls and kill it before it got anywhere near the front line. After paying my fees, I ended up being 25 silver pieces ahead. I did win one of the two magic items that the group found (numbers of magical ‘drops’ had decreased by quite a lot since the breakout) and immediately traded the ‘sharpness+10%’ marble to their front-liner for an ‘Intelligence +1’ one. They had already given me the extra three silver that didn’t divide evenly for the group as my knowledge of the cup of silver was worth easily worth that.

Silver on the market was ‘Officially’ floating around $600 each at this point. It made things both easier and harder. I could have sold it off for about 10-15k, but I wanted to buy a scroll of identifying for 125 silver and identify one of my magic items. It was a $75k investment (or risk), but it might turn one of my ‘unknown’ items into either a real Power, a valuable tool, or (hopefully not) a silly trinket. I felt that there was risk here (I’d heard of basically useless items like a bottomless cup of coffee), but the rewards were possibly astronomical.

My debts were being serviced, my health was good, and the kids and I were generally well. I did sell off the odd piece of silver, it gave me money that the government didn’t know about, and I initially found it odd to pull out cash to pay for groceries or gas since I’d used debit or credit for so long. The cashiers were often hilarious, some of them never having seen a $100 bill before and having to call over a manager (Not so funny for the people in line behind me though!).

I was just Eating the Elephant, one bite at a time.

Things got a bit odd over the next month. I managed to snag two trips into my first pink portals as a frontline fighter. The deal here was that I’d get a full share but was expected to be right on the frontline of a group of only 4. I was worried going in, and a little uncomfortable with the fact that they were all men. While I didn’t immediately get creepy vibes from them, I did become even more worried after I hit the first target with stone from 15 meters off and it just shrugged it off and kept advancing. This pink portal had what looked like an armadillo with a spiky tail and 3-inch tusks. As long as they couldn’t surround you, anyone could easily outrun them.

The plan was to flip anything that came in range and then attack its lightly armoured underbelly. I managed my part by flipping, but the guy next to me who was supposed to be the heavy hitter with a spiked club (flail?) was not very effective against this kind of opponent. I ended up doing most of the work in here while exhausting myself. Besides the other three who were just keeping a lookout and smoking cigarettes, I was basically going at it alone.

The fire-mage and the archer never even used their weapons once. I did catch them staring at me though and resolved to get some baggy coveralls for portal diving with idiots like this. They hadn’t even heard of the coloured stones (Thanks Gregory!), so I snagged six over the two trips that they weren’t aware of. Those 24 silver and the 16 that was my share of the kills meant that I wound up ahead by quite a bit ahead from those two trips with the “Bozo’s” as I had started referring to them in my mind.

I had figured out that this group had been abandoned by their former teammates since they were such lazy arseholes. If they called again, I would be too busy washing my hair.

I fought with myself, but eventually passed on the ‘identify item’ scroll from the Store and instead bought a healing potion on our way out, careful not to let anything slip in front of my ‘teammates’.

It was shortly after this that the Government in its infinite wisdom decided to make portal diving legal ... and regulated ... and taxed.

When the market opened for magic items, I put my ‘Intelligence +1’ marble up for sale, the result was a $600k sale to an anonymous online bidder out of Chicago that had security already in-place at the auction house. The news was full of the story of this character buying 10 million dollars’ worth of ‘silly trinkets that was on par with Dutch Tulip-mania’ (look that up, it was crazy!)

That 600k netted me 400k after commissions and sales taxes. The lucky bidder did very well for themselves, only buying items that could be used to improve themselves (or as I suspected, their kid).

I bought Dave’s half of the of the house (the bank still owned a lot of it) and purchased (mostly) a used camper van. The kids and I could motor up to a provincial park and play on the beaches and in the lakes without the (vast) expense of owning a cottage. With fewer (sadly) patients in my wing, it was simple to get time off and I took full advantage. We had the best summer I can recall and the two of them learned to swim like fish after spending part of nearly every day at the beach or in a river. I’d been grinding away at it for a while and gotten lucky.

I deliberately took time away from portal diving that summer to just ... be.

I imagine Lottery winners get these moments too.

With the end of summer, I rolled back to work, parked the van in my driveway (crossing my fingers that none of the neighbors complained) and got the little ones ready for school.

It was time to grind again, and I’d been feeling the itch to go back in.

I was really lucky that Jimmy had posted something that I could fit in to, and doubly so when he called me up and told me I was on the team. I was ecstatic and now a little concerned that I’d have lost some of my edge during my summer off.

I think I floated through that night shift. Partly euphoric that I was joining a real team for a full set of runs and partly sick to my stomach that I wouldn’t be good enough. I had two weeks to get my edge back. Early morning runs for endurance, nightly Yoga for flexibility and strength (which the kids wordlessly joined in on to my surprise), and target practice in an empty field on my days off.

Jimmy was really the only one with ‘an edge’ for our first run through. A full team of six for a pink portal with Ants is considered overkill for level one. We knew it but had planned to take level one as a team-building opportunity then take the portal down to the next level. It would be a first for me.

Besides being fit, and no-nonsense, Jimmy was also a planner and it showed in his team makeup and meetings.

DeMarcus was a second frontliner, and he had a tower shield matching Jimmy’s. His weapon was a Hatchet, short but heavy (and sharp beyond all reason!) Our plan of attack (which he had a history with) was for the two of them to basically be a moving wall that the rest of us would fight from behind. Two “Heavy Crossbow” men, Tarl and Jude would provide specific attacks with “Javelin” Janet (no joke!) and I having the more rapid, but less accurate ranged attacks.

We had a meal and a rehearsal (in my backyard) that went really well. Tarl, Jude and myself had worked with Jimmy before. DeMarcus and Janet were the newcomers.

I saw the change of expression on DeMarcus’ face when Janet toured the big camper van (which she oddly referred to as a trailer) and pronounced that she and Ray would love spending a week or two camping out if they could use a trailer with a toilet! Janet was tall, slender, but muscular and very pretty in her long black braids. I could appreciate why DeMarcus was disappointed that she already had a partner.

The ‘trailer’ site was already rented for the whole cycle and since I’d drawn ‘watch duty’ for the last two weeks, I decided to pull the kids for a few quiet fall weeks out of school.

Since the Government had acknowledged that the portals were a threat, they tacked on Fees, Taxes and the idea of having a ‘Watch’ for any pink portals that were reserved. You ‘rented’ a portal, paid your silver, then had to have a Weapon in place, at all hours for ten days for each dive, within a 10 min drive in case of another breakout. Nobody mentioned that few (if any) Weapons were at the level yet where they could safely clear an entire floor by themselves, even a Pink one. Another case of the shouts of the fanatically fearful drowning out the whispers of the reasonable majority.

We had a plan, we had a full team, we had two portals (One Pink and one Blue ... Jimmy admitted he’d gotten lucky there.) and we were a team, contractors working for a wage.

Dave offered to take the kids while I was in the portal, and we drove together. He had the charm offensive on full-blast, and most woman would have enjoyed the attention. I felt like I was immune though. I imagined he had seen the financial gain of my Portal trips and was intrigued.

Damn Engineers and Lawyers, always evaluating everything and feeling nothing.

I bet I could have typed ‘Buy Leslie Flowers’ or ‘Take Wife out to dinner’ into his phone calendar and he would have just gone along with it, but I’d still know that I was just another scheduled appointment.

We had a great site, with a nice view out over a lake. It was later in the season, so the grounds were not very full, but the sun was still warm and the beach and lake still swimmable for the kids. They appeared to be completely insensitive to the cold water and even dragged me in for a few teeth-chattering moments.

I dried off, explaining that I was going to dress for the portal. Dave asked if he could watch, with a raised eyebrow. I replied that it was a simple, local show he’d probably grown tired of, and perhaps he should go see it in other cities ... again.

His face said it all. Men all think they’re so clever. Most women know their man has been stepping out within 10 seconds of seeing him again. Whither they decide to acknowledge it or deceive themselves is another argument.

I had a full set of coveralls on top of my body armour, and been warned that there was a few of the Ants who could spit an acid goo. My backpack had some baking soda in it to neutralize acids as well as bottles of water and high-calorie snacks. I learned earlier to bring spare clothes, and toilet paper.

With Dave and the kids watching, (as well as other family of the party) we linked up and entered the first level of Pink. DeMarcus had a two-foot smile when he found ‘Ray’ to be a cute little toddler with tight black curls and adorable chubby cheeks that was being held by what could only have been Janet’s mother.