Teresa Of All Trades (Book 1 Complete)

Thankfully, very few people had actually been nearby and affected by the mist. Several houses had been flooded in the toxic gas, but only about half actually had anyone inside. It took a few minutes without oxygen for somebody to suffer permanent brain damage, though there was a chance Teresa could heal even that.

Ezio's group had arrived, and Elaina was perfect for this situation. Teresa had only seen her use it briefly once to buff Lilith while fighting robots, but Elaina had a fancy staff that altered her spells into a gas not too different from the mist that had affected everyone. She cast her own <Purify> and <Healing Touch> into the staff, and two gasses began emitting from the item.

While Teresa went from one house to another manually, Elaina stuck her staff in a window of each building, pumped it full of Restoration Magic, then carried onto the next one. Together they were able to clear the neighborhood and keep anyone from dying, but it still wasn't a great situation. This was essentially a terrorist attack in the middle of Arconette, and it didn't change the fact that multiple people had still gone missing from Marty's bar.

Teresa herself hadn't gotten the chance to be directly involved in any of the fighting. Once reinforcements arrived, everything finished rather quickly. Mordecai had sniped the mist man through his spine, completely paralyzing him from the chest down. Some healing spells could probably fix that, but nobody seemed to be in any rush to do anything but the minimum to keep him alive.

Preston himself had actually managed to bring down an archer who had been firing at the group, though the remaining archers had to be taken down by other members of Ezio's party. It had been rather easy, but they allowed one archer to escape deliberately. At the moment, Lilith was following the last attacker to see if they could find anyone else.

Once mostly everything was taken care of, all that was left was dealing with the actual traffickers themselves. Teresa and Ezio's party minus Lilith were standing where they had rescued Jeremy. Multiple armed guards had arrived and were escorting some of the actually conscious prisoners away, though they had certainly seen better days. Preston had disarmed one of the archers by cutting her arm off at the elbow, while another had been slammed into the ground repeatedly by Axton until their bones broke. Normally these injuries wouldn't be that big of a deal, but Teresa had honestly forgotten about one key detail.

Using Restoration Mana on invaders could cause backlash.

When a god had inhabited an invader right in front of her, his flesh had begun melting off. Teresa had tried healing the prisoner, but immediately became very ill when attempting to do so. It wasn't as intense now, but there were still side effects to healing the invaders themselves.

Healing the original kidnapper who had taken Jeremy hadn't caused any backlash, which implied that man specifically wasn't a multiversal invader, he came from Earth. The same applied to the archer who Preston had disarmed, a healer was able to prevent excessive blood loss and the archer survived.

The archer Axton went after wasn't so lucky. Healing that one had caused another healer to begin vomiting, and Elaina had to look after them. Teresa wasn't sure how, but Elaina was able to partially alleviate the side effects from this exact situation.

Elaina had used her own <Facilitated Restoration> on the sick healer, which apparently helped. When Teresa had once felt that same backlash, she had felt it in her Soul. How would she even heal that? Where would she start? She had asked Elaina how she did that, but Elaina ignored her question.

Now that things were being taken care of, it was time for Teresa to face the music.

"I told you that if you left that restaurant I was going to personally shoot you." Mordecai grumbled, glaring at Teresa.

"Listen sir," Marty began. "She saved-"

"People could have died if we didn't show up." Mordecai interrupted. "If that had happened, we would be having a very different conversation."

"But Jeremy-"

"Since things went well in the end, I'm alright with skipping the part where we get into an argument over this, we'll do that later. We've got a lot to handle now, and I would appreciate it if you could lay low for more than five minutes at a time for a while." He continued, ignoring Marty once more.

"We're got some new people to accompany you." Ezio added. That was fair, they couldn't exactly have the city's top people guarding Teresa's party in the middle of a crisis. "I appreciate what you've done so far, but we're going to handle the rest of this. For now, I recommend getting in touch with your own city and having them prepare for a group of our own to visit. Just go to the City Monolith and ask for Nalangu, he'll get you sorted out."

A group of six approached, some of whom had rifles of their own. Using <Identify> revealed they all were decent levels, being in their late twenties to early thirties. Teresa noted there was one guard for each person in her party, including Mathew and Thomas.

"Sounds good, we'll head that way." Teresa replied, truthfully glad they didn't have to be directly involved in the situation anymore. Teresa wanted to help people and all, and she was happy to have alerted Arconette to the multiversal threat, but that's not why she was here.

At the end of the day, Teresa was looking for her family. Coming to Arconette had just been to reunite Thomas with Gabriel so that the father could fulfill his end of the deal. Now that was taken care of, there were just a few things left that she needed to do.

First thing, get the teleporting rights all sorted out. It was unlikely that she herself would actually be involved in the negotiations, she just needed to agree to a final deal between The Mall and Arconette.

Then it got tricky. Thomas needed training before they could really utilize his <Familial Duty>. He had already demonstrated that he could find somebody's family member, but that had been over a very short distance. If Thomas was going to be of any use, he needed some levels both for himself and for his skills.

The next issue was the Contaminated Zone. It posed an immediate threat to both Arconette and The Mall, but it didn't necessarily line up with her goals. Destroying Radioactive Portals and possibly even fighting Chernobyl itself probably wouldn't reunite her with any family members, but it's not like she could just ignore the problem.

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If Teresa knew for certain that her and her party's families were all safe then of course she wouldn't hesitate to help. Unfortunately she couldn't guarantee that, which gave room for pause. How was The Mall doing on that front anyways? She could just check the quest screen to see how many Radioactive Portals they destroyed, but that wouldn't tell her a full story.

She was headed towards the City Monolith anyways. She was already going to send a message to someone back at The Mall to explain the current situation, she could just talk to them about it once they sent someone over. As much as Teresa had her own goals, she couldn't just let The Mall get overtaken by magical Skynet.

Both Teresa and Ezio's parties separated as each went to take care of their own business. Admittedly Teresa was pretty anxious about how this was all going to go down. She hadn't been in Arconette for even a day and she had already shot someone. Sure, it was a human trafficker and she had brought attention to a potential trafficking ring, but from a political standpoint how was that going to work? Technically, a government official from a different settlement had shown up in Arconette and immediately uncovered massive problems in the city itself, then proceeded to get involved themself. Teresa was the government official in this case, and she couldn't help but expect that was going to be a pain in the ass to deal with.

Complaining about it wouldn't do any good, and Teresa didn't have any major regrets aside from forgetting to use <Facilitated Restoration> on her party before the fight. That was a skill she had kept active on everybody for about a week, now that she was in the city she forgot she hadn't already used it. Nobody had gotten hurt, but that could have been a big deal.

"I wonder where they're going to keep those guys." Jake wondered as the group walked through Arconette, headed towards the City Monolith. "Like that's a whole problem, how do you imprison someone with superpowers and magic? We had the straitjacket, but unless they have a few of their own then I'm not sure what they can do."

"They might have something else figured out, did anyone else notice the town hall was kind of weird?" Sarah asked. "I couldn't hear anything going on inside until we entered."

"Yeah actually, I caught that too." Teresa answered. "They must have something to prevent people with high Perception from listening in."

"If that's the case they probably have their own method of keeping a prisoner." Preston said, his eyes a bit distant. "I don't really want to think about it, I hate fighting people."

"Once we get someone from The Mall to handle all this teleporting business, how about we go check out those potions?" Teresa offered, figuring she should get the guy's mind off things. He had just cut someone's arm off, plus they had finally reunited Thomas' family. They were catching up with one another as they walked, but the group could use some time to themselves. Checking out how potions worked was probably a good way to destress a bit. They also just seemed useful, regardless of how much Ezio tried to undersell them.

"You thinking of taking up alchemy?" Jake asked.

"Eh, maybe, if it's worth learning. Even if a potion only gives a hundred of a resource it can still have its uses." Teresa answered. "Plus it might be fun, aren't you a little curious how it works?"

"A little I guess, I haven't really thought about the 'how' that much." Jake replied. "We should take a look though, you're right about that."

"There's no way it's just resource potions." Preston spoke up, seeming interested in the idea as well. "Like restoring Mana or whatever would be neat and all, but what about other stuff? You think a potion can give someone night vision or fire resistance or something? What about poisons?"

"In Skyrim there was a trick you could do where you could improve your ability to make potions with a potion, then you could craft an even better version of that same potion repeatedly until you got all powerful stuff." Teresa said. "I think it was Fortify Restoration potions with some armor enchantment, I can't remember. Pretty sure it won't work since the same concept doesn't work with <Magic Wellspring>, but I'm still a bit curious to see what you can do."

"It would probably be beneficial for your class, let you get another skill." Sarah agreed. "I think it's a good idea, let's take a look later."

The party continued on until they reached the City Monolith. It was in an open area with an entire block of space dedicated to just the structure and its surroundings. There were several guards around it, though Teresa noted there were less on duty than last time they had passed by.

They approached the monolith with Teresa in the lead, and a guard came forward to greet them.

"State your business." The guard said, her eyes quickly looking over everyone in the group.

"I was told to ask for Nalangu." Teresa answered.

"Wait here."

The guard walked away and spoke to some of the others on duty patrolling around the monolith. Teresa could hear them talking even from a distance away, but she tried to be polite and not eavesdrop too much if she could help it. Another guard received orders to retrieve Nalangu, and they left the open square to enter a building just across the road. The original guard returned, and Teresa couldn't help but catch that all of the guards seemed particularly alert. She felt bad that she was gauging the security of Arconette, but it was something she did on autopilot.

"They're getting him now, it'll only be a minute." The guard informed them. Teresa nodded, and the party waited until eventually a tall man began to approach the group.

"You are Teresa, yes?" He asked. Teresa nodded, and the man broke out into a wide smile. "It is a pleasure to meet you, my name is Nalangu and I'll be coordinating our exchange. Currently all teleportation has been temporarily disabled due to recent events, but we can allow a limited number of teleports between our cities. May I ask if you would like to discuss the matter yourself or if you would prefer to have someone else from your city to teleport in?"

"Someone else will be handling negotiations, not me." Teresa told the man. Ideally the less she was involved the better, she hadn't been to The Mall in a while.

"Understood. You can use the monolith to send messages to your city and coordinate with them to determine who they'll send here, and once everything is sorted we'll send a group of our own to tour your city."

"Sounds good." Teresa said as Nalangu gestured for her to approach. She walked past many of the guards and placed her hand on the monolith, prompting multiple screens to appear. William had already told her about sending messages with monoliths when she had been negotiating with the Scilians, so it wasn't hard to figure out.

The next question was who should she send the message to? It wouldn't be visible until the person in question touched a monolith, so it would have to be someone in the council who interacts with The Mall's monolith frequently. Obviously it couldn't be Mijo, so it would have to be someone who had their shit together.

Probably Saylee. She had worked with drones surveying the coast of Thailand before the apocalypse, and she was largely involved with managing logistics within The Mall. She mapped out who was taking what Portal and where each Portal was. As such, she rarely left the settlement. Nikolas and Theo's parties both were heavily involved in monster hunting so it was unlikely any of them would see the message in a timely manner, and of the people who stayed in camp Saylee seemed the most productive.

Teresa drafted together a message explaining the situation, being able to 'type' it out in her mind. Teresa tried to include as much information as possible, including everything she could think of. She mentioned Ezio's party and their composition, what was going on with the Contaminated Zone, even the experience efficiency theory thing that Gabriel had mentioned.

Sending the message to Saylee cost Teresa $20, which she felt was a bit of a scam. Teresa may have had over 50 grand on her, but paying that much for a glorified text message still rubbed her the wrong way.

To Teresa's surprise she received a response almost immediately, confirming that Saylee would put something together.

It was nice having people who knew what they were doing.