You must be this old to enter the Dungeon

76) Many happy returns

I sit beneath the branches of an apple tree which spreads out to the horizons blotting out the black void of the Other World sky above us while the thousands of Sun Essence lanterns hang from its branches lighting up the miles of gardens and homes below, and I remember the worst disappointment of my life.

Not being told that my father had left me and my mother, or when I was older and found out all the terrible details, but the moment when I found out that my entire family, me and my Mom, changing our last names to Potter didn’t also include my Grandfather.

I would have been so smug if I could have gone to my first day of kindergarten bragging about how my Grandpa was Harry Potter.

Instead, I got teased for having the same name as a woman who wrote children’s books about a naughty rabbit.

Looking up, I sighed at seeing a green skinned teenager walking up to stand beside me on the porch, with her arms crossed as she glared down at me before inflating her cheeks and gesturing at her sides as she pushed her stomach out.

“No Acey, I wasn’t calling you fat, just big. Gigantic even. Now stop reading over my shoulder.”

The girl that I had grown up with, her projections shifting in age to match mine until I reached the limits between girl and woman, grinned before sitting beside me on the back steps of my Grandpa’s house. She scooted in with her bony hips until I made room, and then leaned in to stare at my tablet as if reading each word.

She had chosen to remain at the apparent age of fourteen since she had picked up on the reputation of Dryads from myths and legends. And she had decided that she would rather remain her human’s little girl that he would tolerate more than her in the form of an adult.

Maybe she will age up, at least one of her when my time as her human comes, but that would mean that my Grandfather would be gone, which is not something I’m looking forward to.

No matter how curmudgeonly he remained.

Acey shook in silent laughter as Vito explained to her what Curmudgeonly meant in a way that made sense to a Tier Twelve Spirit Tree.

She never had managed to learn to read, no awakened plant did unless the person they were bound to either had or gained Mind Essence. They could mimic body language, and facial expressions that they had picked up on, but they never really understood what they meant, only the results they got from them. When they used them on humans and some other people.

But Vito was a true spirit, copied from my Grandfather’s own mind, with all of his knowledge, and unfortunately, his personality.

You don’t cause problems in Harry Bright’s Other World. Vito sees all in his domain, and the Heap can reach anywhere.

So Vito could read, and then pass the information on to Acey, who liked to pretend.

And keep an eye on the woman who had walked off from her own birthday party.

Later tonight, by the way, the System measures things, I would turn Twenty eight, and I would be old enough to enter a Dungeon.

A real Dungeon not one of the ones Grandpa had snagged and joined to his Other World.

I knew this was coming, getting a class, and it being my turn to deal with Dungeons. But it’s still a bit much.

Back when Grandpa got the [ Heartland ] ability for his fifth level in Hermit, along with the Spacial Essence he got for the same, the first thing he did was to seal up the exit to the Other World space he had claimed.

He had always claimed it was because he could only have one door for each level he had in all his classes, and he didn’t see any reason to waste one of them on an old decrepit zoo that he then had already had a near copy of the inside of his claim. But when he opened the Bird Isle Farmer’s Market in the same spot several years later he admitted to me that he had really shut the door because he didn’t feel like answering anyone's questions and that he felt like messing with the Reservists and Grandmother’s team.

Which was entirely in his nature, and a sign of his improving mental health, since before the arrival of Brackets, he wouldn’t have cared about other people enough to have anything to do with them at all.

The second thing he had done was open a new door back to his home and ranked up Acey, who promptly used her access to Spacial Essence to move herself into the center of Grandpa’s new land. Safe and secure from all threats in the Other World of Harry Bright.

A tree, in a place with no sunlight.

I turned and grinned at my friend, who rolled her eyes.

She commuted outside during the day to the various places Grandpa had set up one of his doors, while then returning to her safe place each night. At least until Gruncle Hiram got a hold of someone with Sun Essence and an Enchanter to make the first of her Solar lanterns.

It only cost her ten magic apples that improved the innate Life Essence of anyone who ate them for each lantern.

She’s collected quite a few of them over the years, well over a thousand of them by now, all to light up the fields that grow the Life enhanced produce below her branches.

And her own leaves up above them of course. She’s still a growing girl.

It was a wonderful place to visit after Grandpa paid what he called an obnoxious amount of money online for a narrow commercial building a few miles from my Mom’s condo in LA. A former pizza place with a tiny apartment above it.

It was a second place he had opened a door to, and within an hour of doing so, he was at our front door with a gaggle of coyotes.

Covering a few miles while being carried along with Blink Coyotes only took him a few minutes. It was the first time I had seen him in years.

I had to take a moment there while Acey wrapped her arms around me. Dryads give good hugs. Especially ones that smell like apple blossoms and are warm with Life Essence.

We still had the pizza place, I even moved into the tiny apartment up above it for a few years when I went to college so I could try living on my own for the first time. Not that it meant much with Acey running her bakery down below, she made a lot of apple pies, and the Get of Wylina blinked in and out every time they wanted some attention.

You can’t lock out teleporting Coyote puppies. Blue and Chubby both insisted their mates get Beast Cores from Grandpa, and the pups bred true without having to be awoken.

I have two Beast Cores all ready for Fafnir and Mouser. The two young Blink Coyotes will get whatever Essence I start off with at first level when I eventually get to Level ten, as well as the Life and Space Essence which they started off with. The first generation was too old to have more pups by the time Grandpa got his third Essence so they didn’t inherit it.

By the original timeline, I wasn’t supposed to get a class until I was forty one, but things had accelerated in the Bitter Years.

The Dungeons were allowed to rank up in the arms race between nations, with some of them getting all the way to Rank Eight before the people in charge finally got it through their greedy little heads and their selfish black hearts that the Dungeons didn’t just get stronger as they ranked up, with only stronger monster to go with it.

They got smarter, at least some of them, while others got the ability to use Essence on their own.

They were made from Primordial Essence, pure Chaos, and not everything goes as planned when you mess with that stuff. Not even for the System when it turns it into something humans could deal with and process into other things by collapsing the probability wave through observation and interaction.

The worst ones got so smart, they figured out they were being allowed to get more powerful, and played along by pretending to be dumb and weak until it was nearly too late.

Things fell apart for a while, instead of the age at which you got a Harvester class dropping down one year each year, it started going down by two years at a time, then three.

So many people died that there just weren’t enough older people to keep up.

The Chinese were the first ones to go nuclear. Fortunately, even those kinds of explosions didn't go out of the Dungeon through the entrance, but you didn’t have to drop one in an old person’s lap and push their wheelchair through.

A team of five, The Yellow River Dragons, had carried it fairly deep within the Rank Eight and three of them made it back out before the modified warhead cleared out the entire Quivering Shadows Dungeon that had sending out years worth of saved up Darkest Hungers to unleash all at once.

The Dragons still had to go back into the middle of the flattened blast zone to beat on the core with a hammer four more times of course. It wasn’t enough to just damage the core, someone had to see and participate in its destruction.

I saw the hammer on display in the Shrine of the Fallen Ancestors. Just a worn old tool that was allowed to rest in a place of honor rather than being thrown away.

You might be able to carry a big bomb in and blow a Core up five times instead of finishing it off by hand, but we don’t experiment with Dungeons anymore, we just kill them.

We are now so far into the expanse of Primordial Essence that thousands of Dungeons are created every twenty five days. Enough of them that very few of them are allowed to rank up for people to get their second class at sixth level or the rare third at eleventh.

Some Dungeons just turn out to be so hard to clear, that the higher leveled people who need them have to be called in to take them out. They get what they need, and they are well paid.

Grandpa got Pilgrim at sixth level, and Hierophant at eleventh after he got Wonder Essence at tenth.

They say your first Essence is what you needed before you got a class, the second is what you needed once you had started using it, and the third is what you will need after you stop.

Despite the Outer Space Treaty saying no government can own land in outer space, some guy way back when had began selling land on the Moon for under Twenty five dollars an acre. I tracked down one of the deeds for his eightieth birthday.

Which Brackets decided was good enough for Harry's class abilities, and I got to celebrate my sweet Sixteen in lunar gravity under a dome of Essence and Enchantments that held in breathable air, and heat while protecting the people inside of it from all the nasty things that an atmosphere normally shields you from.

As well as pushing you back when you got too close to the edge of it. Kids were going to be there, so Grandpa agreed to the people who demanded he let them ‘idiot proof’ the place.

They had to bring in the soil for the Lunar Garden, moon dust is terrible for growing anything no matter how much fertilizer you put in it.

But yeah, for that, Other World, and all the other things he got up to, he got Wonder Essence.

When things started to get bad, Mom moved us into a cottage made of some of the Cargo containers Heap had carried in for a group of highly paid professionals to turn into little cottages which were pretty nice despite how narrow the rooms were.

Part of their payment was the apartments for them and their families to move into inside the area that had once been the Glistening Plain Dungeon.

You can’t grow things in glitter, it’s even worse than moon dust, so Grandpa mostly had stuff built on it.

Other world turned out to be a good place to live too.

A lot of people who had helped Grandpa got places for their own in the Outer World, which was great since we had enough kids my age to play with and even go to school with later.

General Ebler’s Reservists, Grandmother’s team’s families, and plenty of others.

Even Reed Bright.

After he got out of jail, Mom hadn’t been the only one he had stolen from, he didn’t have anything. No money, no home, no friends.

No family.

I don’t know why Grandpa gave him a place to live, I don’t think my Grandfather could put why he did so into words either. But the guy got to live in a fixed up old house on the block Reed had grown up on, with his utilities paid off and a debit card topped up each month with just enough to cover the basics he needed to live on.

He wasn't welcome in Harry's world.

In return, he never tried to contact me or my mother. It was left up to me if I ever tried to see or talk to him.

For the sake of the father I remember in the memories of when he was a part of my life, I will go to his funeral when he dies. Until then I have nothing for the man he became. Not even hate.

You reap what you sow.

Looking up, I smile at my Grandpa as he calls out to me.

Ever since he stopped needing to go into the Dungeons after he made all the improvements Bracket’s Conditions had demanded of him, and there were enough other Harvesters to end the Bitter years, he had chosen to finally stop going into Dungeons to gain levels.

Instead, he would pay groups to have a few people in their group hold back after the Core was destroyed to allow him to go in, wait for them to leave, and then claim the place.

His Other World is huge now. And it will still keep going even after the Solar System floats out of the other end of the Primordial Sea, but Brackets say that won’t be for another eight thousand years.

Even with his high Health score, age had started to catch up with my Grandfather again.

He now leans heavily on the Enchanted Apple wood cane me and Acey got for him when he retired, and Blue stays close to him in case he needs to rest his shoulder against her grizzled side.

Blink puppies race around his feet as he waits for me at the entrance to the simple gardens that surround the old house tucked between two of Acey’s roots. It had been moved into the Outer World on Heap’s shoulders before teams of Matter Essence users had gone to work restoring it to its original humble state from back when my great grand uncle had built it nearly a hundred years ago, with as much of it’s remaining original materials magically made brand new again.

With Acey nudging me in my side, I need to finish up before I tuck my tablet away into the Spacial Storage inside my earring and stand up from the back steps to join the party for the day I will gain my first Essence, my first class, and my first level.

In just a few minutes, it will be noon, Greenwich time, exactly twenty years after the day I was born.

Happy birthday to me.