A/N: Thank you all for the reviews!

There is a loose description of Brath back in chapter 9. Basically, it just says long, dark hair and a tan. I'll try to get better descriptions of all the characters in the next few chapters.

…-…

Well, I have sort of good news. One of the cities is Paris. Not that I want that city to be destroyed, but at least I've heard of that place. I mean, sure, it could be Paris, Illinois, for all I know, but I don't think it is—in case you're wondering how I even know that Paris, Illinois exists, what happened was my family went up to visit my grandparents in Illinois one year when I was little and as we were driving down the highway, my parents were all like, "Amy, look! It's Paris!" And being the moronic nine year old that I was, I totally thought we'd somehow made it to France and I was super excited. My entire family laughed for me for a week after that. I'm too gullible…

Anyway, I think this is Paris, France, because I think I saw a broken Eiffel Tower, but it got pretty flattened, so it's hard to say for sure. I guess all that mangled metal could be something else…

And it gets worse. I have no clue if the window is heading east, west, north, or south from that city. I tried triangulating light or whatever, but that was just a big failure. I mean, Maevlen tried to make me feel better by saying that with the cloud cover it's hard to tell and that even he had problems figuring out where the sun was during the different images, but…yeah. They could be looking at cities in another country by now and I wouldn't know it. They haven't crossed an ocean yet, though. I know France at least has a west coast…

But, in a way, this is sort of good. Because France—or Illinois—is above the equator, right? So for all we know, the Legion got held up in Mexico or even Texas—they have a lot of guns there, right?—or…or…I'm really bad at geography and don't know what's south of France. I wish I had google here. I'd just look up a world map. And then I could look up the other cities' names and get a sense of direction.

I so miss the internet.

Anyway, Fizz is awesome—and not mad at me anymore—and practical. Early on, he asked me what I planned to do, even if we found out that we were looking at the very first cities to fall—which by now we know we aren't, but that's not the point. After all, this is just essentially a looking glass, right?

That did kind of get me down. I mean, so what if we can see people are alive if we can't get to them?

Well, I wanted to cross that hurdle before we came to it, because I don't want to find people and be like, 'yay,' and then have them die off as we try to figure out how to communicate with them. I prodded Maevlen—he's never going to get his job done so long as I'm around and I do feel bad about that, but still…there are lives to be saved, I hope—and he said he supposed they might be able to convert the window into a legit portal and send something through to my world, if they really focused the power or something, but that it would destroy my goggles and that would be detrimental to their intel gathering. I told you that they're using the window to try to gather data on the Legion, didn't I? Well, in case I didn't, they are.

Back on topic…

So. I don't get magic, but it comes really close to science here, which I am decent at. I admit, I'm making some assumptions, but…whatever. Think of it this way. You know how scientists say that protons and electrons are always moving, ever so slightly? In essence, everything, and I mean ev-er-y-thing, is moving. Always.

This movement creates energy. Duh. However, particles from one world move differently than particles from another world. That's why, even though I'm human, I'm ever so slightly different from the humans of this world, a.k.a. my magic resistance.

Because my goggles were made from minerals and stuff from my world, it moves the same as anything else in my world. So what they did was they used my goggles to sort of throw out feelers into the universe or something to find a world that mirrored that same energy.

Oh, and the energy emitted from stuff is apparently what determines whether a world can use magic. I got kind of lost during that explanation, but I don't feel so bad, because it was Fizz and Maevlen tossing ideas back and forth and getting really excited, but Neesera looked as confused as I was.

Neesera is a shaman, by the way. That means she's like spiritual or something. When I asked if that was like a priest, she said sort of. And, she can hear the voice of the earth. When I told her that Brath said the earth hurt, she told me that he was being manipulated by old gods who were making the earth's pain to begin with. I wonder if I explained that to Brath, if he'd stop trying to kill everyone…

He's being useless, by the way. At first, I brought him along to help look through the images, but he kept being a jerk and saying stuff like, "Is that a live person I see there? There in the corner? Peeking out of the building?"

I'm ashamed to say that it took eight times before I stopped getting my hopes up and realized he was just being mean. Neesera and the others stopped looking after the third time proved to be him drawing our attention to a particularly mangled body hanging out of a tree.

So, Brath has kind of been banished to the inn. I'm sure the inn keeper loves us for that, but…we had to do something and the stable master refused to let him stay up there—I wonder what he did to upset that guy so much…especially since it seems hard to make draenei hate anything, aside from the Legion. They're like an entire species of saints.

Anyway, my point from earlier is that the goggles are keeping the window open, but if we made it a full portal, it would use up the goggles' energy and then there would be nothing left to keep the window open, so we'd lose the connection. Further, the portal wouldn't last more than a second or two, so we wouldn't be able to get anyone through it. And it would probably go one way—though, I guess that's what most portals do?

I asked if they could use my clothes from my world to make a second one, but they'd already tossed those out. And even if they hadn't, my clothes were so dirty with grime from this world, that it wouldn't have been a pure enough sample. When I offered to let them use me, since you know, I'm bound to have more energy than a pair of goggles, they said that it would probably kill me and they weren't going to throw my life away on some slim chance.

Back to what Fizz was asking. Knowing that this camera was just that, what would I do if I could find out where this is?

My thoughts were that maybe we could use their magic-y abilities to speed up the window's traveling and have it go south. And if we find people, then we can use that second long portal to throw them some kind of message. Something that would tell them that we could help, you know?

Well, how are they going to respond to us if the portal's gone, right? That got me thinking. If we could send them a message, we could explain how the portals worked. And if we need something from my world, then they would need something from this world. But what?

Duh, the message itself. The paper itself or maybe even a little box or something.

But then, we don't have magic in my world, so how would they send it back?

I admit, I was at a loss there. And the others seemed kind of down by it. Like, they're not asking me these questions to discourage me, you know? It's just that if we're gonna do something, we need to think it through. And it needs to be foolproof if we're gonna get the vindicators to back us up and let us destroy their one way to spy on the Legion.

So, about noon, I was feeling kind of down, so I decided to try to brainstorm elsewhere for a little bit—since there wouldn't be a new picture for another forty minutes, I figured I wouldn't miss if we found life. Fizz stayed to help Maevlen try to play catch up—and Neesera had had to go back to her engineering shop to do some orders of spare parts for adventurers. I headed back to the inn and found that Brath was already sprawled out, face down on his own bed—it took me hours to convince him that I didn't need a cuddle-buddy, by the way, and to use his own bed—and it occurred to me that amoral people probably have a bigger arsenal of 'maybes'. Like, Fizz won't say, "Maybe x would work," because it could hurt someone. But Brath…

Well, I trotted over and kind of nudged him to see if he was awake. And then nudged him harder to wake him up. And he still didn't. I was just considering yanking that long, flowing hair of his—I'm still bitter that he cut mine—but he abruptly rolled over, caught my arm, and pulled me on top of him. Well, he tried to do that anyway. He misjudged how much force he would need and I ended up just sitting next to him while he held my arm.

However, I was on a mission and for once I managed to keep from getting flustered or angered by his dumb antics. "You dragons are all into magic and stuff, right?"

"Why do I get the impression you have mistaken me for a mage?" Brath released my arm and seemed irritated that his latest attempt to make someone uncomfortable had failed.

"I don't need a mage's advice; I need yours."

Well, that got him interested. He sat up and leaned against his knees. "What ever for?"

"I wanted to ask you a bit about portals—"

"Again, I fear a mage would do better at solving your dilemma."

I stopped to eye him for a minute. Why did he have to be so difficult? While I considered threatening him that I was gonna send a letter to that guy who wanted all of the dragons dead, I decided against it. Not because I didn't want to see Brath nervous, but because I didn't know who I'd be writing to and Brath would know that and call my bluff and the whole thing would just leave me angry.

"But all the mages I know have morals," I tried to argue. I snapped my mouth shut and nearly bit my tongue when Brath gave me this look. I can't even describe it right. It wasn't exactly offended, but he wasn't completely amused, either. It was like a combination of both.

"My dear lady, I have a very strong sense of right and wrong," Brath put a hand over his heart, as though he were trying to stop an open cut from bleeding, his fingers curling into the fabric of his robe, "If I know it's right, I try not to do it."

I stared at him. "By that logic, since you think the world is suffering and needs to be destroyed, you shouldn't destroy it." Well, that brought me a frown that warmed the cockles of my heart. "Anyway. Look, I have generic magic questions. I bet you can answer them." When he didn't answer, I decided to just ask. The worst he could do was keep up his silence. And maybe talking about my questions out loud would help. "So. In theory, if we find people, we can use my goggles to send them a message, right? But to send one back, they'd need to make their own portal, and there's no magic in my world—"

"So you want to send an isolated pocket of magic to your world with hopes they can use it?" Brath arched his eyebrows.

For maybe a fifth of a second, I wanted to kiss him. You know, before I remembered he was Brath. "Is that easy to do?"

"I am not sure how many times I must impress upon you that I am not a mage."

I hugged him. "Well, I'll leave you to…" I paused. What had he been doing before? "…staring at your pillow or whatever." Even as I made it to the door he'd started to protest, so I turned around and pointed at him. "Right now, you are here to help my world. Well, you're helping by not making the draenei angry, okay? So keep up the good work."

I didn't pay attention to his mumblings as I headed off to find Fizz. It was time to go back to brainstorming.