"As you all can see here." A frantic, almost panicked yet fairly composed voice rang in the room as a single man walked around in a lab coat.
His hair a mess and his pointed ears sticking out like swords. "There is no doubt some other being was around, wielding a power we don't know about which in this time and age is just the power of the Outer Gods and the thing that bruno bastard calls concepts!"
A sigh left Charlotte.
"Where is this thing now? Why can't it just be an error in your machine, Mamon?"
"My! MY MACHINE!?" Mamon rushed over to Charlotte and raised his hands up high as if imitating a bear. With great passion, he moved his hands up and down while yelping out loud. "You think my machine could have anything even close to something like an error? My machines! You must be out of your mind."n0velusb.c0M
"No, evidence here clearly suggests that you are out of your mind."
"What evidence even?"
"Your actions right now?"
Mamon held his chest and looked away. The prideful elf then flicked his hair and turned back to his machine.
"Miss Charlotte, we have been colleagues for a long time so I thought I did not need to tell any of this to you. But please remember the labs of my rule from now on."
"The rules of your lab, you mean?"
He pointed at the board at the back stuck over the trees, no nails.
The very first rule in Mamon's lab stated like a commandment, that Mamon was never wrong.
The second one was that Mamon's completed machines were never wrong. The ones that were wrong, were still incomplete.
"Your machine might be incomplete?" Said Anamis, the wolf ears sticking out of her head drooped a little with her hesitation.
"That is a explanation. But my point still stands. There is something out there and we don't know what. We have to prepare for war right away!"
"You say that every other week, Mamon," the vampire sitting at the back fluttered his coat. "You know that we are always prepared for war. This is wartime."
Mamon sighed and looked away. Very few people understood his genius, that lad Albert was one of the only people out there in fact that seemed to give some weight to his words.
The people here were all extremely displeasing to his nose.
"Fine," Mamon said. "Just keep an out, make sure you check everyone in your groups."
"Alright," the veiled lady sitting at the back said. Everyone in the room turned their attention to her.
Few people in the world were as competent and charismatic as her, even fewer had the disposition to go along with it.
"What is the main agenda of you calling us here?"
Mamon grinned.
"Right, I forgot about that."
"There was something else?" Anamis muttered. "I thought it was just an intruder."
"If he was that sure about that thing he would have long since closed down the entire World Tree and forced us to sniff an intruder out, even if we had to point one of our own as an intruder."
Mamon was that crazy, and Lethe was that understanding of him.
"The main agenda," Mamon muttered. "I may have managed to trace back the origin of the dimension trackers."
A gasp left the people in the room.
The dimension trackers were the giant orbs present in all the dungeons and gates and every other rendition of it that all of their worlds were plagued with. This dimensional tracker was what the Outer Gods used to follow the trace of the people back to their worlds.
"What does that mean? You have found the caster?"
"Trackers can't be one way only, right? Take the satellite thing from Mr. Redhead's world."
Though he couldn't be present for the meeting, Han Jun Ho was one of the strongest found with them as well and was someone everyone here knew.
"Their trackers send signals to space things called Satellites, and then that satellite transfers it to the person who placed the tracker."
Mamon leaned back on the desk of his lab and looked at his friends in the lab. All of them seemed funny.
"It is inefficient, yes, but that was how theirs worked. Of course, geniuses like me or the Outer Gods would directly send it to the person instead of going through a middleman."
If any engineer from Earth was here, they would have smacked Mamon in the head with a wrench. Accessibility issues and the convenience of satellites and telephone wires weren't to be udnerestimated.
"So, with the geniuses like Outer Gods."
"You have found the place it goes back to?" Asked Anamis.
"Is it a location and not a single being?"
Mamon shrugged.
"No way for me to know that. I can't tell if it is a person or a location, all I can do is open a gate to that place. It is just the spot where the signal ends. For all we know, it could be in the middle of nowhere."
"Just like was the case with all the other places," said Charlotte.
All of them turned to her next.
Even though she was being called the 'tenth' strongest, Charlotte was the one who had assembled the entire operation. She was the one who called the shots no matter what.
Though now, quite a few had gained the power to rival her.
"Can you open one?"
"It should take a few months, the location is farther than any place we have looked into before."
Charlotte sighed.
"Get to it. I don't mind the time it takes."
If they could open to the place where the Outer Gods lived.
"It might be possible to be the ones to start the war instead of just wait. We could finally make this defense game one of assault."
"You got it," Mamon said. "If this place is not destroyed by the Outer Gods before us, then we're good."
***
The meeting ended rather soon and all of them stepped out.
After sharing a few more words, the groups dispersed.
The vampire listening in on the conversation was the right hand man of the vampire progenitor, Count Dracula.
After such a revelation, he had no choice but to rush back to his lord and report things right away.
As soon as the others went away, he rushed to the room that had been assigned to him as an office. He placed a hand over the door and searched his pockets for the card that would let him.
The front.
Then the back pocket. His coat pockets and his pant pockets.
"Huh? Where did the card go?"
He didn't have to look for it, though.
Since the door to his office, that only he could open, opened on its own.