A Wizards Misadventures

~~Level Twenty One~~

"What sort of safeguards did you have?" I began tracing the connection of the portal and the other dimension. I arrived at a weird little cluster of dimensions, not something I'd normally travel to, and took a look inside.

"A full runic array for suppressing magical or mundane energies around the portal as well as the standard elemental protections, a forcefield reinforced spatially, and a luck enchantment."

"First of all, the luck enchantment does nothing across the magical void. Luck, or at least the altered kind prevalent around here, is something like the weight of fate. One person can have more than another. Against a magical and literal void there is no fate and thus no luck. Normally that luck enchantment would be great but it's not effective at all when you're dealing with magical voids. The runic arrays and forcefield are alright too and useful if anything nasty comes out this end but by protections I meant anything on the spell itself. Anything to stop you from accidentally reaching into a hell dimension or waking some eldritch abomination or something worse."

"Worse?" she sounded curious.

"Please don't ask that. Anyways, don't reach into other dimensions. Just don't. You have enough trouble in this dimensional cluster as is and you might poke Great Red or something. Also, I've reached across the portal. It seems like you lucked out or maybe I did. You hit a world a lot like yours except that the apocalypse happened and everyone died except for some scattered remnants of humanity. One and a half million people isn't enough to sustain gods, though, especially when most of the earth is a charred wasteland."

"I forgot to account for time. Damn." Athena scowled.

"Yeah, look, I'm going to have to stop you here. No way in hell you're going to just reach across dimensions to see what you get. I don't like to play dimension police but if I see you reach across dimensions again I'll reach into your mind and rip the knowledge of how to do so out of it." She looked angry at me.

"I'm not an idiot," she snapped. "I'm not going to open a portal to Gaia knows where to see what happens."

"I'd like to think that you won't. Anyways, the only thing keeping this portal open is what looks like a last ditch effort by some gods who hid in heaven. With the world dead there just wasn't enough mana to sustain gods. People designed a ritual to reach across to a more abundant dimension like their own but they died before it completed. They vastly underestimated the mana required to reach across dimensions. They just didn't have enough. Recently enough ambient mana was generated by the new inheritors of the earth, dead as it is, to finish the ritual."

"So you can close the portal?" Zeus asked impatiently.

"Sure," I made a surge of motion affinity and an explosion occurred on the other side of the portal. The complex assortment of runes and magical crystals keeping the portal open collapsed and with it the portal. "Done. Now if you'll excuse me I'll be going home." Zeus snorted like the ass he was and Poseidon… was asleep. Hades was staring vacantly into space. On another look it seemed like the skeleton might actually be an avatar of the god that he could possess and leave at will. Hecate seemed too pissed off to say anything.

"I'll archive this project," Athena said, sounding disappointed.

"Look on the bright side: at least you know you can do it. If I ever keel over and you're still around you can use it as much as you like. Hopefully my kids or whatever void mages are left will be sane enough or powerful enough to stop you." She scowled at me. I didn't really care. And with that I strolled out of the room, hoping to never have to deal with the Greeks ever again.