Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but his range is only barely a year and that's not actually enough to get his grander ideas off the ground. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
He did not really intend to end up in a town in rural Florida about this, but the pay is better than he's used to and he can wear bug spray and long pants and cope with the less than ideal weather.