Monroe-Chapter Four Hundred and Eight. Bureaucracy, thy wheels grind exceedingly fine.

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Bob appeared over the parking lot that lay adjacent to a complex of nondescript office buildings. He had cast his flight spell as a persistent effect before opening the portal rather than equipping his armor. While magic was everyone's new reality, massive wings of ash and flame would draw more attention than he wanted.

Descending, he considered the vehicles in the parking lot.

When they'd been picked up the day before, the limousine had looked normal, at least as far as Bob could tell. He'd only ridden in one once before, and that had been prior to the integration during a trip to the United Nations, and he'd been too stressed to pay any real attention to the experience.

He'd sort of assumed that, eventually, vehicles would end up being powered by mana crystals. Gasoline wasn't terribly difficult to summon. Bob had done the math on that years ago, and a tier five spellcaster at level twenty, with ritual magic and a level twenty Summon Mana-Infused Object spell, could summon two hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline for the cost of a hundred mana crystals. He'd once read that the average person uses about fifty gallons of gasoline a month, so that hundred crystals would produce enough fuel to keep them going for five months.

Magic obviously allowed for other options, and it was clear from the contents of the parking lot that some people had embraced them.

Steampunk seemed to be a theme, as did sleek, futuristic-looking vehicles, some of which were clearly designed for flight.

What really drew his attention was the menagerie of animals that were snacking on the patches of green that dotted the parking lots. Horses, buffalo, elephants, antelope, and a variety that featured the sort of terrible blender effect that just screamed that they were monsters created by the System, and being as they weren't paying any attention to Bob, tamed by someone.

The large covered area started to make a lot more sense as Bob touched down. It was clearly the stabling area for the animals, and without even entering, he could see a variety of predators lounging, including several dinosaurs.

Maybe his wings wouldn't have been as big of a deal as he'd thought.

As Bob walked across the parking lot, he considered that things on Earth had changed and had done so really quickly. When he'd imagined what society would look like after the world had embraced magic, he'd sort of only looked at the big picture. He'd envisioned a world where food was plentiful and inexpensive because you could just pay a druid to grow it.

The population imbalance, when compared to Dungeon capacity, had done more to prevent, or at least delay, that vision than he'd expected. He'd done the math, but he wasn't an economist, a sociologist, or any of the softer sciences. Bob liked physics.

He also liked dinosaurs, well, animals in general, really, but while he'd been required to pass his classes, he'd never been deeply interested in how people interacted with one another. At the time, he'd been pretty close to writing his entire species off as a bad idea.

People were nothing if not adaptable, and despite the severe shortage of mana crystals, they'd proven their ingenuity.

He paused as he looked down at the concrete.

Frowning, he cast a Mana Sight spell.

He'd kept that spell active as a persistent effect for years, but sadly the level of the spell wasn't that high, which meant that as a persistent effect, the range was very, very short. Casting it actively extended the range significantly.

Bob panned his gaze around the parking lot again, and this time he was able to see the flows of mana. They were threads, silvery gossamer so faint that he had almost missed them beneath his feet.

He rose from the ground, his magic fueling his Flight spell. Scanning the parking lot from above with his Mana Sight active, Bob could see the pattern. It looked like a ritual. Or at least that was what he would have labeled it. He wasn't sure what exactly it was meant to do, but the weave was precise, almost mechanical, across the concrete, but when it entered the strips of green, it became more organic.

Normally, Bob would have thought that the overall ritual was designed to control or grow the plants, but it was equally as active across the concrete as well, not just drawing energy but expelling it as well.

Bob summoned a tablet of paper and a pencil and began to sketch the pattern.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been at it, having repositioned a few times to get a better angle, when he heard someone shouting from below.

Blinking, he looked towards the entrance of the building where a woman in a uniform waved at him.

"Sir! Sir!" the woman yelled, waving her arms. "Get down! We have an incoming flight scheduled!"

Bob dropped to the ground, his flight spell catching him just before he landed.

"Thank you," the woman said as she approached.

He could see her name tag, which identified her as a C. Herrara.

"Sorry," Bob began. "I was studying the parking lot. Do you know anything about the ritual here?" He pointed down at the concrete. "I've never seen anything quite like it, and I've been using ritual magic for a few years now."

"You were studying the parking lot," Herrara sighed again as she pinched the bridge of her nose. "I thought babysitting a bunch of eggheads would be easier," she muttered.

"I don't know very much about it, aside from the fact that it gets renewed yearly, and it is the kind that locks your mana," she continued. "I have a few of the contractor's cards at my desk, and I'm sure she'd love to tell you all about it. For now, please follow me to the lobby. The guy scheduled to land in a few minutes is terrible about following the assigned parking, it would be just my luck if he landed on you."

"Sure," Bob agreed hesitantly.

As he followed her into the building, he noticed that the lobby had only a single exit leading deeper into the building, the open doorframe of which was positively glowing with mana. He was only marginally aware of coming to a stop as he stared at it.

He tried to follow the mana flows, but it was difficult. They overlapped each other to a considerable degree, which contradicted what Bob had learned from his own experiences. Yes, rituals could and often did interact with one another, it was almost impossible for them not to, as each ritual had an impact on the ambient mana around it, and when casting rituals together, such as the fivefold ritual for creating a Dungeon, the flows looked like nothing so much as capillaries of a human body, wrapped in a spiderweb, but this was different.

The mana surrounding the door frame was chaotic, violent, even. It honestly looked like someone had worked half a dozen rituals on the door frame without any consideration for how they interacted with one another. As he traced the mana flows of one ritual in particular, he realized that whatever it was intended to accomplish, it wasn't. There were two critical points where the flow of mana was completely interrupted as it merged into another ritual's mana flow and then emerged, carrying an entirely different aspect.

He was pulled from his inspection by a tug on his arm.

"I know it's a magic door, but I need you to stop staring at it," Herrara said irritably. "I'm hazarding a guess that you've never been here before, and you don't have a badge on you, so I'll need you to register as a guest and tell me who you're here to see."

"Okay," Bob replied as he turned and followed her to the counter, which she stepped around deftly. "My name is Robert Whitman and I'm here to see Alex. He should have let someone know I was coming, but he's a little excitable."

Herrara huffed. "Yeah, a little excitable," she muttered as she checked her computer screen. Her eyebrows rose. "Well, I'll be damned, he actually used the form like he was supposed to," she shook her head. "That's a first."

She looked up. "Can I see your ID?"

Bob reached into his satchel, pulling out the folder he'd been given by Jason when he'd gone through the spaceport.

His driver's license had expired a year ago, and the address, picture, and physicals on it weren't exactly current.

Herrara blinked. "You don't have an ID? Or even a passport?"

She opened the folder and skimmed over the forms, flipping through them. Then her face brightened.

"Hey, you're that guy!" She exclaimed as she looked up from the folder. "The dude with the cat!"

Bob nodded. "I am indeed the humble servant of my feline overlord," he agreed.

She looked back down. "Looks like you've been gone for a while," she shook her head as she closed the folder and handed it back to him before pulling out a six-inch square thin glass plate, inset with Bob immediately recognized as a ritual pattern. Putting her hand on the plate, he could see her mana energize the pattern, activating it.

"Please state your name," she said in a formal tone.

"Robert Whitman," Bob replied.

"Do you intend any harm on this facility or those within it?" She asked.

"No?" Bob replied.

Herrara shook her head.

"You have to answer in the affirmative or the negative," she instructed, "the spell gets confused if you answer with a question, even if the question is an answer."

"No," Bob said firmly.

"Do you have any extradimensional storage?"

"Yes," Bob nodded.

"You'll need to leave that here," she advised.

"I can't," Bob shook his head. "I have an extradimensional space tied to my matrix."

"You have an inventory?" Herrara blinked. "Well, I guess you would, wouldn't you? Those are pretty rare, most people would rather have a bag or a box rather than run the risk of getting blown up." She frowned. "I'll need to check the space to make sure you don't have anything dangerous in there."

"Okay," Bob shrugged. He hadn't refurnished the space yet, and at the moment, there were just a few changes of clothes, a pile of crystals, and Monroe's bed and litterbox.

"We'll finish the entry questions first," she said. "I know that you have or at least had some sort of portal ability, but I have to ask. Do you have any ability to transit yourself or any sort of material from one point to another without traversing the distance between the two points?"

"I do," Bob nodded. "I have the portal spell, as well as two specialized versions, one which allows me to transit to another dimension, as well as another that allows me transit to another solar system, although both are random as far as where I end up."

"Oh," he paused. "I also have an ability that allows me to switch places with something that I've summoned."

Herrara let out a long breath. "Yeah, I'm sorry, but he's going to have you to lunch or something," she said with a shake of her head. "An inventory and a teleportation or portal power is an automatic red flag. You've got more than one of the later, which just makes it worse. Let me call him and see if he's allowed to come out."

"Allowed to come out?" Bob asked.

She nodded as she looked down at her screen. "Yeah, Alex has a bad habit of disappearing, so they've had him on lockdown." She looked up and smiled. "It's not that bad," she hastened to assure him. "His apartment is a lot nicer than mine, that's for sure." f𝐫e𝚎we𝚋n𝐨𝘃el.𝗰𝗼𝐦

Herrara tapped the keyboard then looked over Bob's shoulder. "This is Herrara at the front desk. I have a visitor who flags as red, but was requested by one of the researchers. It's on the calendar, a Robert Whitman here to see..." she trailed off.

Bob realized she was on the phone but couldn't see the device she was using.

"Yeah, the guy with the cat," she replied, looking at Bob. "Yep, he's awfully tall. Hey, are you really tier eight?"

"I am," Bob replied.

"Yep," she said, her eyes drifting to a point of his shoulder again. "You can come up and ask him yourself," she sighed. "Yes, that Alex." She laughed. "I know, right? It's a shame we can't just send him down as a reward for using the damn calendar like he is supposed to, but this guy has something like four different teleportation abilities and an inventory."

Herrera appeared to be listening for several moments.

"Of course he is," she sighed, then turned her attention to Bob. "He's on lockdown," she shook her head. "He can't leave the facility, but I could have him escorted up here, assuming that whatever you're meeting him about isn't under any sort of restriction."

"Not to my knowledge," Bob replied with a frown.

"Alright, thanks for the workaround, Ryan," Herrara said with a smile. She looked at Bob again. "Alright, so, please state that you will not remove Alex from the facility, and I'll have him brought up."

"I will not remove Alex from the facility," Bob replied.

"Great!" She took her hand off the plate and placed it back behind the counter. "Bring him up."

She tapped her screen again, turning her full attention back on Bob.

"Sorry about all this, regulations are what they are," she offered.

"Sure," Bob nodded.

"Fair warning, one of the guys bringing up Alex, Ryan, is a huge fan and is looking for a selfie," she said.

"That's fine, I guess," Bob shrugged, uncomfortable with the idea. He didn't really understand the desire to have some sort of proof that you'd met someone.

His experiences with meeting important people had varied wildly.

Meeting the King of Greenwold had been an exercise in closely contained terror. Despite advancing to tier eight and having interacted with him several times, Bob still treated the Dragon the same way you might treat an armed nuclear device on a tumbler switch because, as far as Bob was concerned, he effectively was.

Meeting the President of the United States had been an entirely different experience. She'd been a person he'd respected. A fellow native of California, she'd risen to prominence as a moderate in a system where both parties were captured by their own extremists, and he'd always felt sort of proud that someone from not only his state but his university and even Los Angeles, was doing important work. She'd also been rather friendlier than he'd expected and treated him with a degree of dignity and respect.

Yorrick Wrathsbane had been wildly different. The man had done his absolute best to befriend Bob, treating him as an equal, which, considering the difference in their tiers, was almost laughable. Still, he'd done his best, and the head of the Warlock's Guild was awfully damn good.

In none of those situations had Bob ever thought to commemorate the occasion by asking for a photograph.

He was pulled from his musing as two uniformed men passed through the doorframe, followed by Alex.