Today I took the bus to Grimstad. It takes an hour from Kristiansand and costs about $20 each way, so it is not something I would normally do. But the 10 portals in downtown Grimstad have been gray for a while now. Grimstad used to belong to the Resistance, and seemed to be the home base of their agent @andasil, who also for a while maintained a colony in Kristiansand, but he has gradually withdrawn and now even Grimstad is deserted. I hope he is OK, even if he is misguided enough to join the Resistance. ^_^ Hopefully he is just on vacation, and will be happy to see that I have not let his portals lie idle.

I stayed for a little under two hours. The weather there was cloudy, as it was also in Kristiansand when I passed through, so I did not need to worry overmuch about sunburn. I hacked the portals repeatedly (although the ones by the church, a bit out of the way, only got hacked twice). I got two keys for one portal and one for three others, so it could have been worse. Not enough to make fields though – I am keeping the keys to recharge for now.

On the way back, the bus stopped by the university, not far from the two recalcitrant portals that refused to give me keys on Monday and Thursday even though I burned them out. Today they had evidently changed their mind, for each of them coughed up a key on my first hack! Now I can recharge them remotely and not need to walk at my best speed for 20 minutes to get there and 20 minutes back. Well, of course none of us knows what the future brings, but that was the plan.

The clouds had retreated, unfortunately, and the ionizing radiation of this planet’s star is overwhelming the regenerative abilities of my epidermal cells. My face is getting hotter and redder for each day I venture outdoors. And by “face” I now also mean my big forehead, from which my fur has shamefully retreated over the last few years. But I came home to Mandal and found a third portal had gone online here. I claimed it FOR GREAT ENLIGHTENMENT!! so all in all it was a good day.

I installed the rare multihack mod on the portal outside my workplace. My scanner area sometimes drift far enough to hack it from my desk, but it is only a minute or two walking even if not.  Normally I can hack it 4 times early in the day, then it burns out. (You can only hack 4 times in 4 hours without a mod, but you can pace those as you wish, as long as they are at least 5 minutes apart.)

Now with the rare multi-hack, I can hack it 12 times in 4 hours. That amounts to once every 20 minutes. Now, hacking takes only a few seconds, so I could probably do that without interfering much with my work unless I have phone duty, which I rarely have due to my throat problems. But I haven’t set up a timer to remind me every 20 minutes, and as a result I actually never burned it out over the course of the workday. By the time I had hacked 12 times, it was already into the next 4-hour slot.

The nearby portal is owned by the Enlightenment, of course. We pretty much own the south coast at the moment, despite the occasional Resistance tourist. Actually it would have been nice to have a blue portal (I had one for a while) since I get 100 Action Points for hacking those, but no AP for hacking our own. On the other hand, friendly portals tend to give more loot. And of course, it is only friendly portals I can outfit with a mod such as this.

I sent a message to Agent @B3ll3rophon, begging him to throw a couple high-level resonators on the portal (he is level 7 or 8) so it could get up to my own level. That way I can get more level-appropriate loot. As mentioned, I can only raise a portal to level 3 when I am level 4.