Technis watched as the lights on his wall died in rapid succession. Each one was a meticulously crafted asset: spies, infiltrators, and warriors that he and his favored subordinates had crafted to perfectly suit their roles. He didn’t regret his decision to sacrifice them all, but he still felt a small pang of loss.

  But it wasn’t as though he could bring them with him. They were works of art, true, but he had seen enough civilizations crumble to know that works of art could be remade. Once he reached the Old World, he would have to opportunity and materials to make even greater works of flesh and artifice. That thought consoled him as he reviewed his tools’ final results through the eyes of Clark’s aerial spies.

  He wasn’t surprised by what he saw, and he was mostly pleased.

  Mostly.

  He mood was soured as he watched Lempo’s child. He had placed a guardian to intercept her at the top of the Pillar, but he still lacked information on whatever abilities she had used in that fight. Her revealed abilities were interesting, to be sure, but they couldn’t explain what she had done to his masterpiece.

  The artificial creature had been assembled from no less than thirty other beings, folded together like a complicated puzzle, and designed to activate in stages to test her capabilities. He had prepared observation equipment throughout the Labyrinthos and used some of the last remaining transportation technology to rapidly deploy his creation before Lempo’s child could reach the surface.

  And then everything failed.

  His creation was killed, apparently before activating any of its later forms. His observation equipment captured the beginning of their fight, but nothing more interesting than a bit of gymnastics. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Technis had even been denied the dissection of his defeated creation when an army of scrattes had eaten everything but the bones.

  Technis half-believed that Lempo’s adopted the scrattes to insult him. Not only had the simple creatures eaten his carefully designed masterpiece, they had also overwhelmed the dhvaras that Technis held under his sphere of control for the last several hundred years. They had even gotten Lempo’s child to the surface weeks earlier than he had anticipated, throwing his careful planning to the winds.

  Perhaps sensing his mood, Clark cleared his throat and spoke to one of Technis’ puppet bodies. “My lord, I could go out and destroy Lempo’s creature before she rejoins her allies from the Golden Plains. I would be done with her and return long before you need to close the portal.”

  Technis didn’t frown, at least not with any puppet visible to his followers. Clark was one of his oldest and most skilled apprentices, and Technis expected great things from him. Unfortunately, the god could see that Clark had gotten emotional about Lempo’s child.

  Was it her involvement with his relative, Bethany? Or perhaps the gorgon’s victory over Clark’s puppet body in the Underworld still bothered him? Or maybe the failure to contain her within Satrap still rankled him?

  The attachment was foolish – a mortal without even a thousand years of experience couldn’t hope to stand against the child of a goddess. Technis considered the problem: would Clark let it go if Technis ordered him to the Old World? Or would his failure eat away at him until he did something foolish, something like reopening the portal and giving Lempo and the rest of the pantheon another chance to pursue him?

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  It was a risk that Technis wouldn’t take. He also wasn’t going to allow Clark to feed his enemies a steady supply of essence, sending more and more resources at Lempo’s child as she approached his defenses.

  “Do not leave the citadel,” Technis commanded. “We know that she will come to us, and my defenses are worth far more than her allies. You may waylay her here and then follow the rest of your countrymen through the portal.”

  Technis bent his puppet forward, looking deep into Clark’s eyes. “But heed my words, Clark. You must resolve your personal attachment to this world before taking your rightful place on Earth.”

  Clark grinned. “I will return to your side victorious, my lord.”

  Technis nodded in assent, but he thought it likely that Clark would die on Olympos. No matter – time would grant him more skilled followers.

  Technis sent his attention through the slowly widening portal and into his local body. He emerged from an abandoned structure – a maintenance shed of some sort – and brushed himself off. Feeling presentable enough, he strode the body through a small bit of woods, across a wide, paved road, and towards a research laboratory that he funded with money from his assumed identity.

  The pittance it took to acquire skilled researchers still shocked him, as well as the fact that he earned money by having money, but the feelings of easy progress only stoked his anticipation. What would he accomplish with the Old World’s people at his command? His heart would have raced at the thought if he hadn’t updated his body’s biology.

  He used a small, plastic identifier to gain entry to the laboratory and made his way to the cluttered room that housed his research.

  “Kate,” he said.

  The girl yelped with surprise and put her hand over her heart as she spun around.

  “Mr. Highland,” she gulped with surprise.

  He looked over her shoulder, wondering if she had been doing anything useful, or merely watching recordings of small animals. She shifted slightly, blocking some of his view.

  Technis still had trouble understanding the behaviors of the locals. He couldn’t connect their actions with their apparent success, but as long as she produced results he cared little what she watched on her magic screen.

  “What can I help–” she began, but his mouth opened and he cut her off.

  It was an unfortunate side-effect of the signal delay between Olympos and Earth, but, as his subordinate, the girl had no reason to complain about his poor sense of timing.

  “I have changed my mind. I wish for you to pursue your triangulation hypotheses. I will provide more hardware shortly. How long will it take to make your system operational?”

  “W-what?” she stammered.

  He waited, shifting his attention back to some other business on Olympos. By the time his attention returned to his worker she had composed herself.

  “I can stop working on the transmissions and multi-D tuning algorithms if you want, but didn’t you say those were more important than tracking the source? You still wanted to try widening the cross section of the hypothetical interdimensional contact surface, right?”

  He paused for a moment, recalling the version of reality that he had been presenting to the girl. He had learned long ago that consistency was key to keeping secrets.

  “I reflected upon your previous arguments and grew convinced. You mentioned in your last report that the energy you are detecting is growing, did you not? If that is the case, then a sudden cessation of the signal seems unlikely, and we can learn a great deal by studying its point of origin.”

  “Um…”

  The girl hesitated, glancing back at her screen. She shifted slightly, as though she was trying to hide something on its surface without drawing attention to it. “I think a week would be enough time.”

  Technis considered all of the personnel and equipment that he meant to bring through. A week would be enough time, he decided.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I will transfer new funds to your advisor immediately.”

  He turned on his heel and put his remote body into semi-conscious control. He would occupy it once it reached the nearest banking institution.

  After so little action for so long things were finally reaching a crescendo. Within a week, Technis would begin his conquest of the Old World. And with the triangulation technology up and running, he would be able to detect and track any pursuit from Olympos, as unlikely as that would be. He was determined that there be no other outside influence upon the Earth.