The next few days were a turbulent mess. My workload at... work lightened up as I was moved off of projects. On the other hand, my work with Winston was picking up. As I tutored myself on the technology from the three other universes, I became more and more able to help in those situations, even if my understanding was still rudimentary at best.

The money from the gold-selling operation was starting to filer in and my research into the politics of Niger was beginning to pay off.

My network of gold merchants was expanding, so in a couple of weeks, I would be able to offload a lot more gold.

Speaking of which, the operations on alt-earth were going quite well.

The base was growing quickly and the mining operations were approaching full swing with plenty of material being mined and refined. Enough that Gwen was able to buy a bigger and more private flat in New York.

However, tonight was busy for a completely different reason.

Angela, Gwen and I were staking out Mondatta's speech at King's row as Tracer kept an eye out for Widowmaker in particular.

I was mostly near the stage with a collapsible barrier shield while the others were patrolling more generally.

Suddenly my earpiece squawked to life and I heard Lena in my ear, "Widowmaker spotted. Everyone, get into position.

I got up near the front of the stage and got ready, the emitters primed under my backpack. I'd been drilled on the proper deployment, but hopefully, it wouldn't be necessary.

"Widowmaker is down. I'll be in contact with the cops. Remain in position in case any other Talon forces are in the area."

I hit the confirmation switch on my belt and fell back into the crowd.

The speech as actually pretty interesting, so I almost missed Gwen's sudden message, "I found another Talon sniper! Jon, get that shield around Mondatta!"

I whipped the ball like emitter onto the stage and the guards quickly bunkered down around Mondatta.

I had to give it to the man, he was continuing his speech even as the shield stood up to several more shots before Gwen was able to web down the sniper.

We were on guard after that. Winston had placed Widowmaker into some sort of transport and sent her to a prison that he had developed in the hopes of undoing what had been done to her. Even if Amelie was forever lost, perhaps it would still be possible to remove the additions that made her so dangerous.

We celebrated this little success in short order, the first evidence of our shared knowledge and abilities allowing us to do some real good.

We had a few drinks, but we kept things civil.

All of us had work to do in the morning.

So, after Angela returned to her practice, Tracer flew us over to Watchpoint Gibraltar.

Gwen and I entered the Lab where Winston was working on the Portal Generator with Elizabeth.

"How are things going?" I asked.

He looked up to me, "Good news! I've managed to stabilise the primer wormhole."

I took a look at the faintly glowing cylinder. Gwen commented, "Did the negative mass matrix work out?"

"Yes! I've managed to interface the gravimeters and interferometers with it too, so I've started to see some data on dimensional signatures come back from the probe."

I nodded, "has my electromagnetic package worked out?"

He nodded, "I had to do a little compacting, but the package is operating within the expected parameters."

We got to work quickly after that, stabilising and beginning the process of creating new portals.

Activating the device we started looking at the data we were getting back from it.

"That feels weird," Elizabeth commented

"Huh?" I turned to her.

She motioned at the machine, "It feels weird, a little like the portal machines that they made. But different. Quieter."

I nod, "Anything we should change?"

"The other Elizabeths sounded a little… umm…" she waved her hands around in the air a bit, "higher pitched? And more bouncy."

We considered it for a moment, before making some tweaks, "Does this sound better?"

She paused, "It's not as bouncy." She commented. But it gets like that in the middle."

I nod, "I think there might be more than one wormhole involved here."

Winston paused, "That… that would make sense."

We disengaged the portal device and started dismantling it, being careful to preserve the first wormhole as we did.

As Winston began working on another stabiliser pin, I sat down with Gwen and started doing the maths to figure out the field equations that would represent working with two wormholes.

Elizabeth peeked over my shoulder, "What's that?"

I look up, "Huh?"

She pointed at a part of the simulation I was using to double-check my results, "That."

"Oh, it's a simulation of the wormhole architecture. Well, regressed down to three-dimensions, but yeah?" I responded.

Elizabeth shook her head, "This bit isn't so straight. It's... wiggly? And it changes a lot."

"Huh." I leant back.

Pulling up the equations for the simulator, I started looking over the mat again, "Here's the temporal coefficient. You are saying it changes?"

She nodded, "It's like." she gestured with her hands, miming out something juggling, "It's hard to describe."

I leant back…

I guess it made sense… I turned to Elizabeth, "Does the shaking feel sort of like Lena?"

She paused, "She's more bouncy, I guess. And she only shakes one way. That one shakes and spins and bounces and stuff."

I called out to Winston, "Hey, Winston! Got anything good at detecting chronal disturbances? Apparently, the Chronal Coefficient isn't a constant!"

Winston turned to me, "If there are two wormholes involved that would make sense… Let me see if the gravimetric array that I used in the Chronal Accelerator works here."

Poking at the equations again, I started going back over the results.

Eventually, I found it. Apparently as some point, one of us has locked down the temporal coefficient to a constant since it didn't change when one wormhole was involved. It made things run faster, but with two wormholes operating at the same time, we would start seeing a lot of gravity waves in the wormhole chamber.

"Huh. Hey Gwen, mind double checking my equations" I asked.

Gwen looked up from the new casing she was putting together. "What is it?"

"I'm seeing the two-wormhole system producing pocket dimensions. I think it might be how the sensory data is generated."

Gwen paused, "Huh…"

Sure enough, the two-wormhole system was shedding small bubbles of reality that would occasionally be re-absorbed. Since they seemed to be formed from places where the wormholes came into contact, inter-planar space should be full of these sheddings.

Eventually, we began experimenting with other configurations. Nine / six seemed to give the best results, according to our maths. Nine wormhole terminations, with six actual wormholes involved, three of them sort of looping back within a small distance.

The results were… strange. And required the wormholes to be configured in a specific format. But it looked as though it would provide a more stable portal from the stat and possibly better sensor data, assuming our simulations on Void Space were accurate.

We did have a lot of work to do, however. We had theoretically workable designs starting from as little as two wormholes, so we could start to work up from there.

I looked at the sleeping Elizabeth.

Eh, it could wait a day or so. Winston still had to make the new wormhole pins, especially the ring-like designs we would need for the looping wormholes.

As we were packing up, alarms started ringing.

"Everyone to battle-stations. Intruders have been detected!"

I bolted, locking down the computers even as Gwen lept out of the room.

Elizabeth looked at me blearily, "What's happening?"

"My guess? Talon." I grunted. Grabbing the isolated server we were using, I disconnected it from the network, the UPSs complaining almost instantly as the system started undergoing emergency shut-down. "Here, get these to the base, we don't want them finding out about this."

The portal was just closing as the door burst open behind me, a large hulking brute smashed the door open.