"The hell does that even mean, Jaq?" Beth asked, rolling her eyes. "How does somebody flee the damn universe."

"It's not as weird as it sounds," Jaq said calmly.

"Oh? Really? Then enlighten me," Beth said, crossing her arms and leaning back against the wall beside the door.

"You are, I am informed, familiar with Zane Farstrider, yes?" Jaq asked.

"Not sure what that has to do with it, exactly, but I have his contact details, if that's what you're asking," Beth said.

"Bear with me," Jaq said with a sigh. "You know he guards the Maze of Eternity, correct?"

"Right, got that," Beth nodded in response.

"The Maze is an artifact that's older than this entire universe," Jaq explained. "Whether it's something that was created in another universe or at the foundation of this one, Zane would have better answers on that. The point I'm making is, the Maze has an entire separate universe within it. The Maze is far more than most people think, and far larger than most can comprehend; to the point where it's considered one of the ways to leave this universe. It was not, from what I understand, the method that the titans and giants used to leave, but it is such a powerful and unique artifact that it is considered entirely other, different in every way from our universe. In terms of artifacts or places that have known links within this universe, it is likely not the only one that exists, but it is the only one that is widely known, or really known about at all.

"Beyond that, though, there are other ways to leave this universe. The drive cores of starships do so, in various ways, when they leap to FTL, though a lot of people would accuse me of some pedantry for using that as an example. There are ways, if one has the knowledge, the skill, and, most importantly, the power, to get out of this universe. It's the leading theory on what happened to ninety-nine percent of the giants and titans, leaving only some descendants or those that were considered to be full-blooded of the species for various reasons behind. There is a famous story from many, many millennia ago of a dragon that tore a hole in reality and flew away, some say to the heavens, though I don't want to get into some theological chicanery right now. Others say that dragon, a black dragon, by the way, found another, higher plane of reality, sitting above ours, and had both the skill and the raw power to tear a tunnel from our universe to that universe."

"And you think that's what the giants and titans did?" Beth asked somewhat skeptically. "This seems like the stuff of fairy tales more than science. I know magic is real and everything, but even that operates by certain rules and, if I may say, scientific principles. This whole kind of thing about somebody 'tearing open the sky' is a bit farfetched, isn't it?"

"Not at all," Jaq said, shaking his head. "Do you know what the Civilization Normative Scale is?"

"I haven't the foggiest," Beth said, shaking her head now.

"It describes the level of a civilization as a whole; how advanced they are and what they can do. It measures the amount of energy they have access to," Jaq explained.

"Oh, I know what you're talking about," Beth replied. "We had something on Earth like that before we knew magic was real. It was based on just technology, what would happen if a civilization controlled all the energy on their home planet, then of their home system, and then of the entire galaxy."

"Yes, precisely," Jaq said. "The CNS measures such things in much the same way. It classifies a unified civilization on a scale of one to nine, with one being a people that have mastered the steam engine, and nine being a civilization that controls multiple planes of reality. I don't want to get bogged down in the details, and the whole reason I brought it up was to say I have spoken with people from a level five civilization, which is one that controls the energy output of an entire galaxy, and they assured me that higher planes of reality were real and could be journeyed to, though they explained how it was almost always a one-way trip."

"So, to sum up, the giants and the titans left to go to a higher plane of existence, or a different universe entirely, like the Maze of Eternity, but they didn't go to the Maze itself," Beth said, ticking things off on her fingers. "And, some years ago, Baelvyr and the rest of you found a ship with some living members of the giant race from that time period where they were leaving the universe and you need this system to…what? That's where I'm not clear on the whole thing."

"Those giants were in stasis for at least a few hundred thousand years, if not longer, depending on what exactly happened to them. We're not even sure if they're from before the Great Exodus, as some people refer to it, but they've been asleep a long time. There's two problems with that; one, no stasis is a hundred percent perfect and that will lead to at least some degradation; two, the giants were not perfectly healthy when they went into stasis. The combination of both factors makes it much worse; being in stasis that long, hundred of millennia at a minimum, is enough to cause some pretty severe damage, but the ones we can confirm are still alive were injured from the very start. That means that even those giants are practically dead men walking, and they don't even know it. We need something that can give us a major edge in saving them, as there are very, very few records where we found the sleeping giants. Any data we can glean from this is going to largely be coming from those peoples' heads, and we need them to not just keel over dead as soon as we wake them up to have any hope of getting that information."

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"Okay, I'm a little clearer on the situation," Beth said. "Still, not exactly sure what the rush is. They've been sleeping hundreds of thousands of years; just let them nap a little longer."

"It's not that simple," Jaq retorted with a deep frown. "They've been in stasis too long, though it's not the accrual of damage I'm mainly worried about. Their stasis technology is advanced, but it hasn't been maintained in fifty, sixty, maybe ninety millennia. It's old and it's breaking down. It's almost a cosmic irony that we found them right before their stasis failed, considering that failure will most definitely kill them. Despite it being somewhere between five hundred millennia and fifty thousand millennia, we've gotten there at the very last minute. It's one of the several reasons we agreed to this job; guarding a Hall on your world, that is. It gave us the positioning, freedom, and timing to explore several possibilities. The Pinnacle Reinvigoration System, as the Seven Sigils' people named it, is our best bet. The power system being thrashed is going to add layers of complication we didn't need to this whole thing."

"Anything we can do to help?" Beth asked, understanding just what the problem was now.

"No, we have people either close to or matching the level of knowledge and skill that your pocket Ascended have," Jaq said. "The whole decommissioning the derelict thing was just a cover to get this system and get it hauled to the right place. Now that I have the system, I'm going to have to take the pieces to where we've set up to try to wake the giants. We're running out of time and now we've got to do extensive repairs to something I don't even have the full schematics for before we can even try to enact our already crazy plan."

"So, where does that leave us?" Beth asked with a frown.

"Nothing's really changed," Jaq said with a shrug. "I'll take the equipment and head out; I would suggest you ride with me and see about getting the parts you need to fix that cruiser of yours. If you sell the salvage you've already pulled out, along with the fighter, you should be able to come up with the cash to fix it. If you use that trading house you love to work through, they can handle what you've got so far, and your pocket Ascended can easily finish the repair work, and any redesign you still want done. You'll just have to get back here, but you're resourceful; I'm sure you know more than one person who could get you here."

"How much time do we have?" Beth asked.

"I'll give you twelve hours," Jaq said. "And that means, in twelve hours I will be pulling the ship out of the hangar and accelerating up to jump speed. Don't show up in thirteen hours and expect a ride. I'll put the fighter in my secondary cargo bay until we're back on Earth. It's your problem after that."

"Right, let me tell my team what's happening," Beth said.

"I would prefer if you just tell them I've got what I've need and I need to leave due to the time critical issues I've already mentioned," Jaq said.

"With your old war buddy, right," Beth said.

"Stick, to that cover as much as you can for now; no reason for us to go spreading this all over the known universe. We're in enough of a sticky situation as it is; we don't need every Wayfarer alive poking their noses into this while we're under a time crunch," Jaq said.

"I'll tell them we've got all the pieces and that you need to leave in twelve hours," Beth said with a nod. "We can talk more about the rest of it later."

"Good. Let me get this mess of a power system back to the ship," Jaq said, adjusting his beret before opening the door, Beth grumbling a little as she put her mask back on while the dense atmosphere of Jupiter blasted into the room.

Beth gathered her team and informed them of the deadline they were under and what was happening, at least in generalities. Val volunteered that her Ancestor could get them back here if they really were in a pinch, but Beth said she was pretty sure she could come up with something. They finished some teardown they were doing on a few sections of the derelict over the next eight or nine hours, getting everything packed up and ready to go still with plenty of time to spare. As soon as they were on Jaq's ship and had told him that they weren't going out to do any more salvage work, he had them in the air and heading out of the derelict. Beth looked at it a bit wistfully on one of the screens as they headed out; they had pulled quite a lot of wealth out of it already and it would be a ticket to much more. Getting that cruiser they found up and running, while an expensive pain in the butt, would give their group range and access, not just to the derelict, but to plenty else.

Jaq took them back dirtside at all possible speed, Beth almost able to feel the impatience wafting off the man. He wasn't nearly as polite about the little FTL jump as he was on the way out, only waiting ten minutes of the engines burning hot before he jumped, landing them within half-a-million miles of the Earth and burning hard for the planet. They were back groundside before they knew it, and Jaq helped them get the starfighter moved out of the cargo hold, getting it set in the garage before he was back in the ship and taking off. Beth would have to figure out something to do about the ship, as the fighter was too big for anything they had to store it except the reliquary. Casting her mind's eye into the reliquary, she saw that it was a good deal larger than she had thought. She had assumed it was a relatively small area with a few small palaces grouped together, but it was more the size of a large country. Knowing that, she touched the fighter craft and sent it into an unoccupied area, letting it sit somewhere in the open.

After that, it was time for a break, as they had been working for a couple months on the disassembly effort. Not only had it been a few months, but it had been months of working with barely any breaks at all. Bjorn and Kris took off for a couple weeks, as in they literally left the world for a couple weeks to relax with just them. That left Beth, Sera, Val, and Blood in the suite, with Val and Blood perfectly happy to just lay around on the couch. Val had had, well, not exactly the roughest time, but she hadn't had an easy decade or so with the Young Scions. She was more than happy to hide away for a long time, though Beth also suspected Val was also happy to be out of the public eye. Even random people on Earth knew who she was, even if they weren't a hundred percent up to speed on what the Young Scions had been all about, which showed that at least their publicity had been top notch.

Neph was also there, having joined them almost as soon as they got back from Jupiter, and Beth let her use the gate for some more extensive training sessions. The younger girl was doing well in catching up to them, though it would still be long years away before she got even close. Still, Neph was determined and was putting in an enormous effort, so Beth certainly wasn't going to say anything detrimental that would be a blow to her morale. She knew just how tedious other people found fighting for days or weeks on end, so seeing Neph do it so much, with such a cheerful attitude, was something that was really worthy of their praise.

Beth and Sera spent a lot of time in the suite as well, but they were more focused on their smithing work. They had each gotten at least a level in the past handful of months and were making good progress through Journeyman, but it would still be at least a year before they could even hit the barrier to Expert. Beth suspected that it would be much closer to two years of objective time, but that was factoring in that they wouldn't likely be using her gate for quite as much of the work. Between having to use it for leveling, for other training, and the fact that it could still put a bit of strain on her, they couldn't just spend the next objective year in there continuously working on their crafting skill. On top of that, Beth knew that Sera would never go for that, as the dragon was interested in smithing, but certainly not that interested in the profession. It was enough that the two of them were keeping relatively even and would be ready to use the token Beth had sometime in the next handful of years.

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