Today's excursion with Rose Anne went a lot better than what I had feared.

Her avatar improved in her skills, and improved immensely, in fact. We did not fight enemies this time, but her concealment is almost as good as my avatar's, so we were able to dodge a few wolves that we encountered along the way.

Furthermore, we found a lot of information on Tom Pero's avatar; he actually never left Evernorth.

Instead, his avatar had created three daemons to travel to Cray Fenton's dymensional plane in North Kempton and do the job for him. Rose Anne and I followed the trail through the portal and into the dymensional plane version of North Kempton. Here, we discovered that nearly every avatar and daemon had accepted my card idea. My card idea was a big fashion there, in fact.

The only issue was that I could not find the avatars linked to Meona Bell and Sari Frame. I found avatars linked to their friends but they said that they had not heard from Sari, or Meona, or Cray.

"Is everything normal over there in the real North Kempton?" I asked an avatar named Sophie. "Or is something a bit off?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Sophie said. "Just the fact that someone tried to hack the phone lines here."

I tried to probe but Sophie knew nothing else. This was obviously something that I would need to check on tomorrow. In the meantime though, I was actually alarmed by how quickly the card thing was taking off here. And everyone seems to be aware of the portal. Also, since the authorities had been in communication with Rachele, along with my plan not being yet ready for the next phase, I took a wager and asked Rose Anne to keep the card thing a secret.

It was a dangerous move, but she agreed.

Right after I got back to my bedroom, and bade goodbye to Rose Anne for the day, I turned to my ticker and noticed a message had come in. It was from Cray Fenton; and to my relief, it was a message of reassurance. He discussed how Tom Pero's parents own a small jewelry franchise in Daylram, and how Tom's parent's house was also his grandparents' residence and how it was a rather large estate.

He then went on to explain how both sets of Tom's grandparents had left the nation of Prove during their Great Continental war. Apparently, they had been part of the democratic revolution against the Provan ruling class at the time, but though the Unjoy royal family was also supportive of this change, the grandparents were not on par with the Unjoy family. So they moved to the Great North.

Cray then explained in his message that when the borders closed, he tried to have his avatar go out and try to make observations on his dymensional plane, as he was worried about infiltration from the Lykians. He tried to do this by dialing a certain code on his phone in the Great North into North Kempton, which you can apparently do. However, his attempt had been futile because his line to the other phone turned out to be blocked. He stated that he sent an urgent ticker message to North Kempton to call on Sari and Meona to check on that and had not heard a response since.

For a second, I was a bit skeptical, speculating that perhaps either Cray was forced to lie that he was alright or that someone else claiming to be him sent me that message. But then I thought back to Sophie saying that someone had tried to "hack" their telephone lines; and that made Cray Fenton's message believable.